450 Feet Under
by Veldeia
Summary: "So. Sitrep. I'm stuck in a cave with no way to communicate to the outside world that I'm alive, and a couple of hundred feet of rock between me and help..." - Or, cave rescue, Avengers style. Takes place at some non-specific point in time after Iron Man 3 and before Age of Ultron. Established Steve/Tony, though it's mainly in the background.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** This is my first Avengers fic and my first Steve/Tony fic ever, and though I have written a fair amount of Iron Man fic, that was six years ago. So, I'm feeling a bit anxious and very excited about this!

The first draft of the entire fic (all 14 chapters of it) is already nearly finished, but I'll be doing a lot of editing and posting the story one chapter at a time.

Warnings: Some rather nasty injuries. Well, just one, really. And no missing limbs, I promise.

* * *

It was just another routine mission. Supervillains, aliens, dictators, natural disasters, cats stuck in trees. Trying to contain a fantasy monster with a Norse name only Thor could pronounce that had emerged through a dimension portal somewhere in the Dinaric Alps. Yup, completely routine, and not outlandish at all.

From an uncomfortably intimate distance, the monster's breath smelled so vile that it made Tony feel like throwing up despite the suit's air scrubbers. Instead, the creature ended up throwing him into the air. Maybe it thought he stank, too.

As soon as he realized he was hurtling through the air at such a speed and angle that he wouldn't be able to stop his fall, he concentrated on trying to remain as relaxed as possible with the ground rushing to meet him. It wasn't a thing that came naturally to anyone with a sense of self-preservation, but Tony was almost preternaturally talented at it by now. He'd been tossed around enough to learn how to minimize the damage. Relax and let the suit take the hit. He'd be fine.

He smashed into the grassy mountainside, the sound of protesting metal ringing in his ears – but the impact wasn't quite as hard as he would've expected, because something gave way – and he was still falling.

"What the hell?!" he cried out loud.

* * *

Steve did not cast a second glance after the plummeting Iron Man. He'd seen Tony survive worse falls with minimal consequences. He ignored that soft note of concern always playing somewhere at the back of his mind, and concentrated on tactics. Tony had distracted the monster enough to give Thor the perfect opening.

"Hulk, hold that creature right there", Steve shouted. "Thor, now's your moment!"

When he heard Tony curse over the comms, Steve afforded another look at where he'd crashed. Instead of a red and gold form on the ground, or better yet taking off to rejoin the fight, all he could see was a gaping hole.

* * *

After a seemingly endless panicked tumble Tony finally came to a standstill. He found himself in a narrow, roughly circular pit, surrounded by rocks of various sizes. The occasional pebble or grain of sand was still raining down every now and then. Looking up, he could just see an enticing sliver of blue sky, some hundred feet above him.

Many of the larger boulders around him barely seemed supported by anything at all. If he stared at them for too long and thought about it too hard, they might actually remember they weren't supposed to be levitating like that and they'd fall down and squish him into an Iron Pancake.

He really, really did not like it down here. He had to get out. Fast. Before he panicked completely, because that would be embarrassing.

Without thinking, he fired the thrusters to fly to freedom.

"Sir –" Jarvis started in a warning tone.

A fraction of a second too late, Tony realized his mistake: his right boot wasn't exactly upright but caught under a rock, not pointing down but sideways – towards the center of the heap of unstable rubble.

Accompanied by a terrible grinding rumble of shifting masses of rock, he was sinking again.

* * *

Thor landed next to Steve, a victorious smile on his face. "That monstrosity shall bother us no longer! What a battle – it reminded me of the carefree days of my youth! But why the long faces, friends?"

Steve looked from Thor to Natasha. Her expression was as controlled as ever, but he'd learned to know her well enough to see the tense undercurrent in her eyes. Bruce was already back in human form and was standing on the other side of the sinkhole with a blanket on his shoulders, supported by Clint. The worry on their faces was more open.

The hole wasn't all that big, maybe 25 feet in diameter, but it was impossible to say how deep it was due to the rubble that filled it. Steve could have sworn that for a while there, he'd heard the familiar high-pitched sound of Iron Man's repulsors, faint beneath the rumble of falling rocks, but it was gone in an instant. Now that the dust had settled down again, there was no sign of anyone or anything moving in the depths.

"Tony is still down there," Steve said.

* * *

For the first half a minute or so, Tony tried to fight it. He wouldn't go like this, not like this, buried alive under metric tons and cubic meters of rocks, that was just, no, that wasn't right at all! He lived a dangerous life and had a vivid imagination, and he'd come up with thousands of ways to die, but this had not been on the list. He would've picked anything else before this. Not dying at all would also have been good, but he was starting to think that wasn't on the cards today.

Struggling only made things worse – shooting at rocks caused them to break apart and collide with other rocks, and he dislodged additional debris from the walls of the pit, and anyway there was no clear path to that beautiful blue sky above him anymore.

He must have blacked out for a second or two, because the next thing he knew, Jarvis was shouting in his ear loud enough to rattle his most likely concussed skull.

"Sir! Mr. Stark! SIR! Wake up!"

"Yes, yes, stop shouting!" he grumbled, forcing his eyes open. "What's the damage?"

The readout on the HUD wasn't nearly as bad as he would have expected. Must be his lucky day, in some very strange and twisted definition of lucky. Maybe having a demigod as a friend helped. In any case, the suit had taken countless blows, but all repulsors were still more or less functional, and even more surprisingly, the weakest component of all, his fragile flesh and blood body, had come through without any critical injuries. He did have injuries, though. He could tell that without even looking. Ouch.

"Your right tibia appears to be fractured," Jarvis stated, in a low, wary voice, much softer than when he'd woken Tony up. "However, the most pressing concern is that your current location is extremely unsafe. Predicting 75% possibility that the boulders above you will collapse within the next 5 minutes."

Suddenly wide awake and quite clear-headed, Tony quickly took in his surroundings. In front of him, there was a gap between rocks that didn't quite seem big enough for him, but looked like it could lead to a larger space. The boulders above him, the ones Jarvis deemed unstable, were so close that his helmet would bump against them if he raised his upper body from where he lay, his chest against a stony surface. And his right leg, the one that was seriously starting to ache now, was pinned under yet another rock.

That explained why Jarvis hadn't just autopiloted him out of here straight away. Trying to move his injured leg carefully enough to keep the rocks from collapsing, while also avoiding further damage to it, would require finer control of the suit than even Jarvis possessed. If it was possible at all.

"Sir, may I suggest the 'getting the hell out of here' -maneuver?"

Tony was sure there was a pop culture reference there but he couldn't quite place it.

"Working on it, J."

Bracing himself against the pain that was sure to follow, he pressed his helmeted forehead against the ground, and began by attempting to very, very gingerly move his right foot.

Even at the slightest of movements, the effect was instantaneous: the all too familiar sound of something very heavy shifting above him, dust was starting to fall – and no matter how lucky he might be, suit or no suit, he didn't need advanced physics to figure out that he would not survive if those boulders landed directly on top of him.

Slow and careful was not going to cut it.

This time, when he fired the repulsors, he knew it was a horrible move, but it was also the only one he could think of.

The pain in his leg – oh God, he'd experienced his fair share of pain, but this was right there in the major league – he had a horrendous mental image of his leg getting torn apart below the knee, leaving just a ragged stump, blood spraying on the falling rocks from severed arteries – and then, finally, mercifully, he blacked out again.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony jolted awake, eyes wide open, with the distinct feeling that he had been in the middle of something Very Important when he'd taken a nap.

There were stone walls above and around him, not built but rough, natural. A cave. He was in a cave, and his chest was hurting. Of course it was. It was a miracle he was alive at all.

He could remember it now, the attack on the convoy, the explosion – they were using his weapons! – and the tearing pain in his chest when the shrapnel pierced it –

His heart racing, his hands flew to his chest, to the gaping hole with the magnet and the car battery and –

"Sir, you're safe. Calm down. Breathe in. Breathe out," Jarvis's voice rung in his ears, steady as ever. "You know how to do this. Deep breaths. In. And out."

– and wait, he was wearing gauntlets, and they met another thick layer of metal – gold-titanium-alloy – covering his chest, and Jarvis was speaking to him, and he was fine.

He was fine. There was no car battery, no magnet, there wasn't even a hole in his chest anymore. No arc reactor buried in his sternum. Top-notch surgery and a some clever controlled use of the Extremis virus, and his chest was a perfect specimen of sculpted human flesh again.

As perfect as they were, though, his ribs were definitely aching with each breath, and when he opened his eyes again, he was still in a cave. No unstable boulders that he could see, just a tunnel, about ten feet wide and fifteen high. It looked perfectly solid and sturdy, but that didn't make him feel much happier.

A goddamn cave. He hated caves.

Now that he'd gotten over the little flashback/panic attack – the first in ages, but it wasn't like it was unreasonable to have one, because seriously, cave, ugh – and realized that the pain in his chest was probably broken ribs instead of something instantly fatal, he remembered what had actually happened, and the varied aches and pains all over his body started to coalesce into white-hot agony between his right knee and foot.

Perhaps 'fine' was a bit of an exaggeration.

* * *

The holographic map floating in front of Steve's face looked like the intestines of some huge beast, or like someone had tossed a bowlful of spaghetti into the air and frozen it in mid-flight. It was a maze in three dimensions, and since he knew the size of the collapsed sinkhole at the edge of the map, he could tell there were miles and miles of tunnels.

Both Steve and Thor had wanted to start digging right away, but Bruce, amazingly calm, had told them that it might be the worst possible thing they could do. The ground was potentially very unstable, and they had no idea how far down Tony could be or what his status was. So, instead of leaping into the pit to start clawing at the rubble with their bare hands, they had retreated to the Quinjet. A few minutes after Bruce had sat down at the computer console, he had produced this map.

"Tony must have landed on the most unstable part of the entire system. It would probably have collapsed sooner or later on its own," Bruce said, motioning at the sinkhole, which lit up bright red amid the orange of the rest of the tunnels.

"That's really impressive," Natasha said, without actually sounding all that impressed. "But isn't there any way you could actually locate him?"

"I'm afraid not, and you'll need to save the feedback for when we find Tony, because it's his scanner," Bruce said. "Stark Industries made this thing for prospecting purposes, not for search and rescue. We'll just have to assume that if he doesn't have an easy and safe way out, he'll be smart enough to stay put and wait for help."

He might also be too badly injured to move, Steve thought, but didn't say it aloud. The others were probably thinking the same thing anyway. The Iron Man suit was impressive, but they'd seen the size of some of those boulders, and even if the suit itself hadn't broken to pieces, putting that much weight on top of it would probably have crushed Tony inside it.

Steve's face must have reflected his thoughts, because now Clint's hand was on his shoulder. "He'll be fine. It's just a matter of getting him out of there," he said reassuringly.

"And between us, we will burrow to the depths in no time at all!" Thor declared.

"No," Bruce said, without raising his voice but still adamant. "What I said earlier still holds. If we dig anywhere close to that hole, we might cause another cave-in. We can't take that risk."

"What do you suggest, then?" Steve asked, although he already had a good idea of where this was going.

"There are several entrances to this system," Bruce pointed at the map, and they lit up in green. None of them were exactly close to the sinkhole. "The shortest route seems to be through there," he pointed out on the map, drawing a green line from one of the entrances to the bottom of the red collapse. "The scanner's resolution is not good enough to give exact details about the shapes of the passages, but it definitely seems doable. It shouldn't take much longer than an hour to get to the sinkhole through the cave system."

"All right, then, Avengers," Steve said. "Seems we're going spelunking."

* * *

"Jarvis, can we contact the others?"

"Unfortunately, no. None of the signals we can send would penetrate the layer of limestone separating you from the surface."

"Figures. Of course I'm on my own. Would be too easy otherwise. Damage report?"

All things considered, the suit had come through spectacularly. Nothing a day or two in the shop wouldn't fix. If necessary, he might still be able to fly, although the right boot repulsor was a bit iffy, since the right leg had suffered the most. But hey, at least it was still attached. He hadn't been entirely sure it would be, considering the way he'd felt earlier.

"I'm afraid I must inform you that structural integrity has been compromised in both the suit and your leg," Jarvis said. Way to put it eloquently.

He had to see for himself. Ignoring the jarring ribs – possibly not even broken, just bruised, he'd had worse – he propped himself on his elbows.

The angle of his right foot was all wrong. The boot was not supposed to turn that way, no matter what, not with his knee pointing up. His shin was a complete mess of dirt, metal, blood, and – oh shit, that white bit could only be bone –

Feeling like he was going to faint, vomit or possibly both, he slid back to rest on the ground.

* * *

They very nearly got into a fight when they started talking about who would be going.

Steve would go, that wasn't up for discussion. Everyone else wanted to go as well, and Steve loved them for that – the team really looked after one another. Still, as Bruce reminded them, navigating through the potentially very narrow passages of the complex underground labyrinth would be much slower with a team of five than, say, three, which was the party size that they finally settled on.

There was the matter of making sure that the monster they'd knocked out wouldn't suddenly wake up and start wreaking havoc again. Thor finally resigned to take the role of guarding it. There was no getting around the fact that he was the largest of them and would be at a disadvantage in tight cave passages. Natasha, on the other hand, was the smallest and the most agile, so she was definitely in. That left Bruce and Clint, and out of the two, to everyone's surprise, Steve finally settled on Bruce.

"Who in their right minds would take the Hulk into an underground maze that could collapse any second?" Clint had complained.

"Not the Hulk," Steve had replied. "But Dr. Bruce Banner."

Truth be told, Steve felt the same way as Clint, but Bruce had the best first-aid skills, and surprisingly enough, also a fair amount of experience about caves. Apparently, it had been a hobby of his before he'd gained his angry green alter ego. Not for the first time, Steve found himself regretting how little he knew about his team mates' lives before they had become who they were today.

So, Steve, Natasha, and Bruce would be going underground. Clint would remain topside to arrange the monster containment plan and to try and figure out if there was any chance of getting help from local cave rescuers. Of course, they were so far in the middle of nowhere that it would take a while before anyone reached them – Steve wasn't even entirely sure what country they were in, after the merry chase the monster had led them on. Clint was somewhat better suited for that job than Thor, who would have his hands full of monster if it woke up again.

It felt like the planning and preparations took ages to finish, but when they were ready to go Steve checked the time, and it had only been about half an hour since the ground had swallowed Tony.

Wearing headlamps and harnesses, carrying first aid supplies and coils of rope, the three Avengers headed up the sunny mountainside towards the entrance that Bruce had located.


	3. Chapter 3

Waiting for the nausea to pass, Tony flipped open the faceplate. The last thing he wanted was to be sick inside the helmet.

"So. Sitrep," he said aloud, mainly to keep himself sane. "I'm stuck in a cave with no way to communicate to the outside world that I'm alive, and there's at least a couple of hundred feet of rock..."

"From the duration of your fall, I would estimate closer to five hundred, sir," Jarvis interjected helpfully.

"I stand corrected. Five hundred feet of rock between me and help. The way I came in is definitely blocked, and I'm sporting the most spectacular compound fracture which will no doubt make moving around a bit – interesting. Plan of action... Trying to get out on my own might be a challenge."

"I wouldn't recommend it."

"Feel free to speak up if you have any better ideas, Jarvis. The only other one I've got is, sit tight, try not to die, and wait for rescue."

He did his best to push aside the thought that they could've taken him for dead and left him here on his own. They wouldn't. He might not be everyone's favorite in the team, but still, they would come and look for him. Wouldn't they?

Steve would never give up on him. He'd dig his way down with his bare hands if needs be.

"No doubt the other Avengers are already on their way," Jarvis said reassuringly. "In the mean time, you might wish to implement some basic first aid techniques."

He should, he knew that, but he was not looking forward to it. Although he wasn't shy of performing medical procedures on himself, he wasn't entirely sure if he could handle this.

"Do you think I should try to set it?" he asked, apprehensive.

"Negative, sir. I'm registering both the dorsalis pedis and posterior tibial pulses, indicating that the circulation has not been compromised. Unsuccessful attempts to manipulate the fracture could make things worse."

Tony blew a long, relieved breath. "I'm so glad you said that. Keep an eye on the circulation and lock the suit as it is, then." There was still enough left of the suit's leg that it should act as a makeshift splint, keeping the fracture in position, albeit a misaligned one.

Once he got out of here, he could get the leg fixed, or fix it himself. He was rather attached to that leg – had had it all his life, after all – but if the worst came to pass, he'd deal with it. He still had access to Extremis, and he could probably grow himself a new leg with it. If that didn't work, he could build one. This was just a minor setback. Everything would be golden once he got out of here. So, concentrate on just staying alive. He was good at that. Should be a piece of cake.

* * *

Steve eyed the cave entrance disbelievingly. "That's it? Really?"

He wouldn't have noticed it without Bruce pointing it out, and he could only imagine how difficult it would have been to locate without an exact map. Luckily for them, Bruce was carrying one of those rugged tablet computer things, with a map of the surface as well as the scan of the underground tunnels.

"I've seen worse," Bruce said mildly, crouching to take a closer look.

It was a tiny slot in the pale limestone outcrop, just big enough for one person to fit through at a time, heading down into the depths. Bruce had told them that the entrance was vertical, but Steve had been expecting a large open pit, like the one Tony had fallen into, not a man-sized chimney.

Steve had been reluctant to leave his shield behind, but it was starting to look like it had been the right call. The shield wasn't exactly small, and it would certainly have been a hindrance if this entrance was any indication of what the rest of the cave was like.

"Oh, that's good, there are actually bolts here," Bruce commented, sounding pleased. "Clearly someone has visited the system before. There isn't very much wear on the rock, though, so it's probably not a popular place."

"This far from civilization, that's no wonder," Natasha commented. "It must be a day's hike to get here from the nearest village."

Bruce started working on hanging a rope at the entrance. According to the rough estimate that they had, the entrance would be a rappel of around 120 feet. Aside from it, there shouldn't be many vertical shafts in the cave, one or two, each less than a hundred feet in depth. The map put the bottom of the collapsed sinkhole at 450 feet below the entrance, and lacking any actual information of Tony's location, they were going to aim for that. They had a thousand feet of rope, which was all they'd had on the Quinjet. Maybe a bit excessive, but then again, Steve really did not want to run out before they reached the bottom, and he didn't mind carrying it.

"There, I think that looks about right," Bruce said, stepping back to show the others how he'd attached the rope to the two pre-installed anchor points. "I guess I should go first, just to make sure there are no surprises and that the rope actually reaches the bottom. I'll see you down there!"

As serious as their reason for being here was, Bruce seemed to be enjoying himself, Steve noted. The scientist was actually smiling a little as he sat down on the edge, attached his descender, and started sliding down.

A few minutes later, they could hear his voice call out from the depths: "Rope free! Next!"

Steve and Natasha looked at each other. "Ladies first," Steve offered, gesturing towards the entrance.

"Very well, Captain," she answered, and moving as quickly as Bruce had, lowered herself into the slot.

Steve had to admit he was feeling a bit nervous. With Bruce in his normal human form, Steve was by far the largest member of the party, and he wasn't all that accustomed to confined spaces. Still, he did have plenty of experience of all sorts of extreme situations, and ropes were nothing new to him. And Tony was down there. So, when Natasha shouted that it was Steve's turn, he wasted no time following the two others into the depths.

* * *

Tony went through the list of potential complications in his mind: blood loss, shock, infection. He'd seen plenty of blood around the fracture, but at least it didn't seem like he'd damaged any major blood vessels, so there was some hope that he could avoid shock altogether. He'd even stay nice and warm as long as he was in the suit. Infection wouldn't be a concern right away, but considering how dirty the injury looked he'd probably need to do something about that.

"Any views on controlling the bleeding, Jarvis? A tourniquet?"

"Negative on that as well, sir. The bleeding does not appear serious enough to warrant jeopardizing the circulation to your foot. My recommendation would be to clean the injured area, inspect for further bleeding, stem that with manual pressure if needed, and dress it."

Oh. Ow. "You do realize how much that's going to hurt?"

"In this case, the long-term benefits are greater than the short-term discomfort."

Yeah, and Jarvis was an AI without a physical body who knew enough to talk about these things, but had no actual concept of pain. Not that it was an entirely bad thing – it meant that at least one of them had a clear head and a capacity for logical thinking.

Wound cleaning, then. The suit's hydration system included two separate reservoirs, and then there was the recycled waste, but that was nearly empty right now. He'd just need to use up some of his clean drinking water. He took off his gauntlets and spent the next couple of minutes working one of the two water containers free. He probably used a bit more time on it than strictly necessary, because he was so not looking forward to the part that came next.

He took a sip before holding the container above the fracture. How he wished he had something stronger than water in it. Alcohol would've made a better disinfectant, too.

"Well, here goes, then."

He let the water trickle down. He couldn't keep himself from crying out when the cool liquid hit the injury - it felt like he was pouring acid on his shin. Not that there was anyone here to hear him anyway


	4. Chapter 4

**Warnings:** Graphic description of injury. Also, I probably should've said this at Chapter 1, but if you're seriously claustrophobic, you might not enjoy certain parts of the fic very much (particularly some of the later chapters, this one isn't that bad). Then again, the story does take place in a cave, so that's probably not a huge surprise to anyone.

* * *

The cave entrance really was narrow, almost too narrow for Steve to operate his descender in it, both his back and chest rubbing against rock. At least the walls were smooth, with no risk of anything snagging.

He couldn't help thinking about how difficult it would be to bring someone who was injured through this thing.

Thank goodness, the narrow part went on only for maybe a dozen feet, and then it widened into a more spacious ravine, a deep, narrow canyon. The rope was hanging freely in the middle of it. The walls behind and in front of him were still close enough that he could easily touch them if he reached out, but to each side, he couldn't see where canyon ended. He looked up, and could only just see the daylight he'd left behind.

Soon, he spotted Bruce and Natasha's lights below him, and heard their voices. The sound echoed so much in the high narrow space that he couldn't make out the words.

At the end of the rope, he landed on a rocky floor, and took in his surroundings. It seemed they weren't actually at the bottom of the canyon, but walking on some very large boulders that filled it completely. Bruce and Natasha were standing on the edge of one them, staring ahead, along the long axis of the canyon. Bruce had his map-tablet out.

"We should keep following this passage for as long as we can," Bruce said. "It's the easiest way to the lower levels of the system."

"Do you think – are these boulders stable?" Steve asked, remembering full well the collapse they'd witnessed earlier.

"Technically, you can never really be sure," Bruce replied, not too reassuringly. "But I'd not worry about it too much, they do look like they've been wedged here for quite a while. I think we can climb down without expending any rope," he motioned at the direction where he and Natasha had been looking. The way on was a series of boulders forming a slope with occasional steeper drops.

"I should probably go first," Steve suggested.

Bruce gave him a disappointed look. "If you're worried I'll suddenly lose my temper, you should have left me on the surface. Remind me again, how many limestone caves have you visited?"

Well, Steve had been to Mammoth Cave once, when it was a brand new attraction, on a promotional tour. He didn't say that aloud. And he did have his doubts – the combination of an unfamiliar, challenging environment and the knowledge of how difficult the Hulk was to control made it hard not to be a little concerned. He didn't say that either.

What he did say was, "It's not that. But if there's some kind of a landslide, I've probably got the best chances of surviving it."

"As long as I'm here, I'll go first. I'll know where to step, there won't be any landslides," Bruce declared.

"You boys done yet? We should get moving," Natasha said. "And for the record, if we hit anything really tight, I'll be the one to go first."

* * *

Tony had finally finished the excruciating process of cleaning the injury. Time for the moment of truth. Terribly anxious, he forced himself to look at his leg again, to really look at it properly, which he actually hadn't done yet.

He was underwhelmed, truth be told.

Not that it wasn't bad, it definitely was. Just the fact that the suit's plates were broken and twisted enough to reveal glimpses of his undersuit and skin made that quite clear. But now that he'd washed off the worst of the mud and gore, there didn't seem to be quite as much blood as he'd first thought, and the fracture was only bleeding sluggishly. Some of the blood was coming from where the sharp metal edges of broken armor had cut into his leg, which definitely wasn't nice at all, but those wounds were mostly superficial.

The worst of it, the exposed segment of tibia, less than two inches of it, wasn't really sticking out very much, it was just there, in the middle of the torn skin and undersuit and suit. Seemed like a clean enough break, too, no additional bone fragments as far as he could see. Yeah, not at all spectacular then. Perfectly fine. He'd just hop up and walk out, no problem. Not.

He realized he was chuckling, just a little bit, just slightly hysterical and breathless. It was really starting to hurt his ribs, but they were nothing compared to his leg, so he could easily ignore them.

"What is it, sir?" Jarvis asked, sounding uncertain.

"I just, you know, it's actually not that bad. It's probably the single worst fracture I've suffered in my entire life, and still, it's not as bad as I thought. I had no idea you could stare at a visible bit of broken bone in your leg and think that it's not that bad," Tony babbled.

"I'm not quite sure I agree with your assessment. You are correct that the break does not appear immediately life-threatening, but the risk of severe complications remains, and you are in urgent need of medical attention."

"Tell me about it. Now, I guess I'd better bind it up."

He obviously didn't have any bandages with him, so it was a practical challenge to figure out what to use. He ended up taking the armor off his good leg so he could cut the undersuit into suitable strips. He took his time doing that, and rebuilding the armor around his leg. After it was done, he carefully wrapped the sliced neoprene around the injury. That, of course, also hurt like the dickens, but finally, after a lot of swearing, moaning and whimpering, it was all done.

His head swimming, he cautiously lay down on the ground again. "Remind me to design some kind of an IV painkiller system into the suit the next time I make upgrades."

"Duly noted, sir."

* * *

Although the canyon was so high that they couldn't see the ceiling, it remained so narrow that they had to advance in single file. They kept clambering downwards, one boulder after another. It wasn't very difficult, but some of the climbs were tricky, since they required balancing on very small and extremely slippery holds. Many times, it would have been faster to leap down, but Steve was not keen to test whether the boulders would hold if he did.

They didn't encounter any major difficulties, and they didn't need to use any rope. They all were well suited for this, Steve with his enhanced physique, Natasha with her agility and training, and Bruce with his careful concentration and experience of underground spaces.

They kept moving downwards for what felt like at least two hundred feet. That was great, because it meant they were constantly getting closer to where they were hoping to find Tony.

Steve tried not to think too much about it, but he wasn't sure how realistic it was to expect that they might actually find him. His imagination kept conjuring up all sorts of worst-case scenarios, visions of massive piles of boulders with a gold-red gauntlet or a bloodied hand reaching out from under them. They didn't even know for sure that Tony would be at the bottom of the collapse – really, what reason did they have to expect that he would be? Maybe he was buried somewhere in the middle of it, unreachable. Maybe he was already dead. But they had to do something, and this was their best shot.

He surfaced from his gloomy thoughts when they came to face the biggest drop yet.

"Around fifty feet, by the looks of it," Natasha said from where she was standing, just behind Bruce, who was kneeling at the edge, looking down.

"It might be possible to free climb this," Bruce noted. "But I think we'd better put a rope on it. There are bolts here as well, we've got plenty of rope, and it will definitely make this a lot easier coming up."

Especially if we're coming up with someone who's injured, Steve added in his mind. That was the other thought that he just couldn't shake. So far, everything they had done had been easy enough for three people who were in good shape, but for anyone who wasn't – let alone carrying someone...

Steve pulled out a stretch of rope from his pack, and handed it to Bruce, who attached it expertly, and rappelled with practiced ease.

The bottom of the rope finally brought them to the bottom of the canyon: the floor was mostly compacted mud and some rocks here and there. The passage was also more spacious than anything they'd seen so far, wide enough for two people to walk abreast.

Steve checked the time. Thirty-five minutes since they'd come in, and they had already covered most of the vertical distance. They were making good time. On the other hand, put that together with the time it had taken them to prepare, and it meant that Tony had already been missing for over an hour.

Bruce was looking at the map again. "This passage goes on for almost a mile, but it's not quite in the right direction. We should start looking for one that leads to the right instead. There are several potential routes that I can see, but I'm not sure if all of them are feasible. We'll just have to find out by trial and error."


	5. Chapter 5

One would have thought that lying down and resting would have made him feel better. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Without anything to do, with nothing to keep his mind off the situation he was in and all the damage he'd taken, Tony soon came to realize he couldn't stay like this for long.

It wasn't just his leg, although that was a torment that dwarfed everything else, and not just the ribs, which reminded him of their existence each time he drew breath. There were a dozen other, smaller things: a nagging headache, a constant, annoying itch in his side where the edge of a bent plate was digging into it, not quite sharp or deep enough to pierce the undersuit, and his back was so sore all over that it might've been bad enough on its own to make him unable to stand up straight. Of course, the catalogue always circled back to his leg. He'd never ever spent this much time thinking about his right leg. He had quite nice legs. Well, used to have, before this. Not so much now.

"Jarvis, how long have I actually been here?"

"Forty minutes since you landed in this passage. Fifty since the cave-in."

It had felt like hours to him.

To occupy his mind with something, he figured he should take a proper look at where he was. He hadn't done that earlier, since he wasn't a huge fan of caves to begin with, so he'd preferred to ignore all the rock surrounding him.

He didn't feel like sitting up again. Instead, he closed the faceplate, and asked Jarvis to relay earlier video feed to the HUD.

He was lying in a smallish tunnel along its long axis. It clearly wasn't some crack in the ground that had opened up because of the collapse, but a proper cave passage that had been around for a while, and probably belonged to a larger system. The walls were an uninviting grayish brown, the floor sprinkled with rocks here and there, and glistening with moisture. Not far from him, there were a few shallow pools with standing water in them. Jarvis noted that in rainy conditions, there might be a lot more water in this passage. Good thing the weather had been nice and sunny. There were no stalactites or stalagmites or anything decorating the passage. Not a particularly remarkable place.

In the direction where his head was pointing, a couple of dozen feet from him, there seemed to be some boulders that filled most of the passage. But he couldn't have come from there, because his feet – and his leg, oh shit his leg, yes, there it still was, burning – were pointing the other way. Jarvis confirmed it. He had taken Tony to a safe distance from the collapse, which meant it was a few hundred feet in the other direction, behind a slight bend, not visible from his current location.

The boulders that he was looking at, though, seemed to be blocking the passage completely. The other end of the passage, the one that would supposedly lead deeper into the cave, and potentially to another way out.

His breath caught in his throat. The walls were closing in on him.

There were boulders blocking the passage at both ends. Even if he could walk – which he obviously couldn't – he wouldn't be going anywhere. He was in a completely enclosed space. This miserable little stretch of passage was the last thing he'd ever see. He was at a dead end. Dead. End.

"Sir, you really need to calm down," Jarvis was telling him once again, but what was the point?

* * *

The first side passage they found was ridiculously small. It was little more than a crack in the wall, just wide enough that Steve could see Bruce and Natasha fitting through it, but he wasn't so sure about himself. Natasha went ahead to do some reconnaissance.

Steve and Bruce waited in rather tense silence for a few minutes. No sign of her coming back yet.

"How many potential passages did you say there were?" Steve finally asked, to break the quiet.

"Um, four-ish. The problem is that the resolution isn't good enough to say which ones are big enough for us to go through. That one right in front of us seems like a decent-sized thing on the scan, but obviously, it's rather tight, and – "

Bruce was interrupted by some muffled swearing in Russian, followed by the sounds of Natasha approaching through the narrow tunnel. She emerged from it with a large smear of mud on her right cheek, and a very annoyed look on her face.

"I wouldn't recommend that to my worst enemy. It goes on like that for maybe a hundred feet, so narrow that I couldn't turn my head, and then it became really tight. I had to spend a minute arranging my limbs the right way before I could fit through. Just as I'd managed to force my way into a wider space with barely any hand or footholds, I realized that there was no floor below me anymore, just a huge drop. I have no idea how deep it was, but deep enough that I couldn't see the bottom. No obvious anchor points for ropes."

"And no point in wasting more time on this one, then," Bruce said, already on the move, looking for the next side passage.

Steve couldn't argue with that. If it was so tight that Natasha could barely fit through, there was no way Steve would, and he doubted Tony would, either.

The second passage they found looked even narrower than the first one. Natasha took a quick look and announced it impenetrable.

Steve kept checking the time. The minutes were ticking away as they went on surveying the right hand wall for anything that might look passable. Their map was not accurate enough to show the exact locations of potential tunnels, and some of them might be easy to miss because of how small they were, so there was no better way to do this, but it was taking them far too long.

The third side passage was different from the previous two: not so much a narrow crack but a low round tunnel that sloped down and to the left, the exact direction where they wanted to go. It wasn't spacious, but it was big enough that Natasha could walk if she stooped. Steve was so much taller that he had to go on all fours, but that fine. This was the first thing they'd found that seemed promising.

* * *

It took Tony much longer to get his act together this time, since he just couldn't bring himself to care. It didn't matter what he did or didn't do. He was stuck, well and truly stuck, with no way out. The walls were closing in and crushing him. He was stuck. He was done.

He just lay there, hyperventilating – or hypoventilating, if that was a thing, since his bruised ribs kept him from fully expanding his lungs – staring right through the bright red warnings of rising heart rate and dropping O2 saturation that were flashing on the HUD in front of his eyes.

Jarvis kept shouting at him to breathe. Well, he was doing plenty of that, wasn't he?

Oddly enough, in the end, it was the flashback that made him snap out of it.

That old broken record started playing as soon as he'd reached a level of oxygen deprivation where his eyesight was getting a bit fuzzy. He wasn't in a cave anymore, but in The Cave, staring at the rocky ceiling above his cot, trying to remember how to breathe properly after another session of first-hand proof that it would indeed be perfectly possible to drown in a bucket.

The crude electromagnet was a heavy weight in his chest, and although he was grateful that it was there and keeping him alive, it was just ugly, as engineering went. Plain ugly. He could make a much better one himself. He could build something graceful and powerful and...

He could build something. Yeah. Hell, yeah!

He took a deep breath, ignoring the stinging ribs, held it for a bit, and exhaled. And repeat.

His head was starting to clear. Jarvis finally stopped complaining, too, probably something to do with his vitals returning to normal range.

He might be stuck in some squalid hole in the Balkans, with hundreds of feet of rock between him and any other living soul, but he was still Tony Stark, and damned if he was just going to sit here and wait for a rescue that might never be able to reach him through all those boulders. Why the hell had he been thinking that his only options were to limp out on a broken leg or to wait? Sure, he could cut himself some slack because just being in a cave seriously messed with his head, and there was that pesky compound fracture thing, too, but still, that was just stupid!

There were two obvious approaches that he could think of right away. Firstly, he could try to send out a message, a signal, anything to let the others know that he was alive, maybe even give them an idea of where he was. Secondly, he could actually do something about the fact that he was in a seemingly enclosed space with no way in or out.

Thinking of sending out a signal, Tony had to admit he had never studied the problematics of underground radio systems. Obviously there was no Internet access down here, so he could only rely on Jarvis's offline database for information. Fortunately it was quite extensive – well worth carrying the extra hardware instead of a predominantly cloud-based solution.

He first assumed it would be a straightforward thing to boost any old radio signal enough that it would reach the surface. In reality, a quick discussion with Jarvis regarding the characteristics of the stone around him suggested that only low-frequency waves could penetrate it. He'd need to build a very big antenna to send his signal – probably doable, but it would take him a while, and more importantly, the people on the surface wouldn't know to expect the signal and would probably miss it. Maybe not the best way to go, then. Oh well, that was just the first idea. He was only getting started here, he'd think of something else.


	6. Chapter 6

The tunnel was getting smaller as they advanced, the ceiling slanting down more steeply than the floor. Soon, Natasha was on all fours as well, and Steve's back was brushing against rock. His vision was limited to the smooth, dark gray limestone around him and Bruce's backside in front of him. He was glad none of them were claustrophobic.

They'd been going for maybe ten minutes when Bruce stopped. Looking past him, Steve could just see Natasha's boots disappear into the continuation of the passage that was very, very low. Low enough by the looks of it that even Natasha needed some time to get through it.

"Oh boy, this is going to be interesting," Steve muttered.

"It's going to be fine," Bruce said, not entirely convincing. "You just need to make sure you don't get both arms jammed between the floor and your body."

Natasha had disappeared from sight, and for a moment, they just waited, crouched, listening to the dragging sounds of her moving further in the tunnel.

As soon as the sounds stopped and it was quiet again, she shouted, "Well, are you coming or not?"

"How tight is it? Do you think we can actually fit through?" Bruce asked her.

"I'm not a hundred percent sure," Natasha replied, without any attempt to sugarcoat it. "It's going to be snug, but I think it's possible. It gets wider again after ten feet or so."

"All right. We'll never know if we don't try," Bruce said resolutely, and started pushing his way forwards.

Steve was trying very hard not to think about what might happen if Bruce should somehow get too frustrated in the tiny tunnel. Instead, he concentrated on what their alternatives would be if the passage proved too small for Bruce, let alone for Steve. From what Natasha had said, it definitely seemed to go, and it might lead closer to Tony. It would be great if even one or two of them could reach him. Maybe Steve would tell the others to go on and he'd return to the previous tunnel alone, to look for some alternative route.

Bruce seemed to be doing quite well, wriggling through the narrow passage no slower than Natasha had, without even a grunt or a word of complaint. Soon, his shoes were out of sight, and Steve was alone in the low tunnel, feeling like an idiot for even thinking that there might be a risk of Bruce turning into the Hulk down here.

"It's actually not that bad," Bruce announced, a minute later. "Natasha seems to think we're bigger than we really are, I might be slightly offended by that. I'm sure you can make it as well, Cap."

"Okay, here I come," Steve said, pressed himself as close to the floor as he could, and started crawling forwards.

As Captain America and an Avenger, he'd been in plenty of small spaces – all sorts of sewers, maintenance tunnels and ventilation shafts – but none of them had been quite this small. It was like he was completely encased in rock – which brought up some unpleasant memories of being trapped in ice, or sealed in a metal tube in a science lab, such a long, long time ago. But he didn't have the luxury to waste time on such thoughts. He thought about Tony instead, Tony who might be waiting for him right at the end of this very tunnel.

He grabbed at whatever purchase he could get from the rocky surface and pulled himself forwards, his cheek against the floor because there wasn't enough space to hold his head up. The tunnel got even lower, so low that it felt physically impossible for his shoulders and chest to fit through. He breathed out, trying to make himself as flat as he could, and just managed to squeeze past the constriction.

After that, the tunnel opened up a little, and he could turn his head again. The first thing he saw was Bruce, who was there waiting for him, a reassuring smile on his face.

"You used to do this for fun?" Steve asked him, incredulous.

* * *

Concentrating on a technical challenge made Tony feel miles better. He could easily dissociate himself from the pain now, just like he could always dissociate himself from minor annoyances like sleeping or eating when he was working on something important.

He'd moved from signals to punching holes in the walls or the ceiling. It would be a trivial thing for him to do, really, all he needed to do was to overload his suit's arc reactor. Would take him less than a minute. The way it was designed, unless something really weird happened, the blast would be a narrow, directed beam that should easily break through the limestone, probably all the way to the surface. He quickly ran a couple of calculations, and it seemed promising. The problem was, he didn't know enough of the structure of the cave around him.

The Quinjet had a scanner that could produce a basic map of the lay of the underground tunnels, but he didn't have one of those in the suit. He couldn't tell if there was just solid rock between him and the surface, or possibly more tunnels. Jarvis noted that the latter was more likely, since the entire region was karstic and honeycombed with cave passages. Unfortunately, without knowing the lay of the land, blowing up anything might make things a hell of a lot worse. The original collapse that had trapped him here had been proof enough that the ground above him was on the unsteady side.

His eyes half-accidentally happened on the time when he was running a simulation, and to his surprise, he saw that he'd been working for over an hour. Time did fly when you were having fun. Of course, that meant he'd been trapped for close to two hours, and there was still no sign of anyone doing anything to get him out. All the more reason for him to try and do something on his own.

Maybe blowing stuff up at random wouldn't be the best way to go either, as much fun as it was. He took another look at the boulders blocking the passage. They didn't seem as impenetrable as he'd first thought in his earlier irrational, panicked frame of mind: there were holes between them, and maybe someone who wasn't burdened with a few hundred pounds of armor and a broken leg might be able to squeeze through the blockage. He obviously couldn't, but with a bit of correctly applied force, he might be able to shift them to clear an easier way through.

Of course, there was a slight snag in that plan. He'd need to study the boulders in more detail in order to figure out where to apply that force, and what he had on the HUD simply wasn't good enough. So, he needed to get closer to them first.

He hadn't tried moving since he'd woken up on the cave floor. The most he had done was to sit up. He had no idea if it was feasible at all for him to try and get anywhere, but there was only one way to find out.

He sat up. He'd need support if he wanted to stand, and the walls weren't far. So, he'd start slow and easy. He braced his palms against the ground and pushed himself towards the nearest wall, still sitting down, back first.

It really hurt. Who would've thought. There were tears in his eyes. Still, it seemed doable: the suit kept his leg relatively stable, and he was pretty sure he'd just about make it to the wall without fainting from the pain.

* * *

The cave seemed to have mercy on them after the tight squeeze: the passage quickly grew to its earlier, stooping dimensions, and finally an easy climb brought them to a perpendicular tunnel that was a comfortable walking height. By Steve's reckoning, they had just about reached their target depth.

They took a left turn, and kept going. Steve was hurrying forwards, and since there was enough room for them to move past one another, he ended up leading the way. The passage was still going, and soon, they faced a new set of obstacles. Here and there, their way was blocked by boulders of varying sizes, many of which they had to climb over or to squeeze past.

Then, he ran into a wall.

The boulders blocked the entire passage, from the floor to the ceiling, which wasn't even visible. It definitely looked like the bottom end of a cave-in, and there was no sign of Tony anywhere.

"Bruce, is this it?" Steve asked, his earlier hopeful mood rapidly veering towards dread.

Bruce stopped in front of the boulders as well, and produced the tablet from his bag to inspect the map. "I'm confident that we're in the right passage, but other than that, I'm not so sure."

He stepped even closer to the boulders, to take a better look at them. Steve was staring at them, too, but the rocks didn't tell him a thing. He could see there were plenty of spaces between them that someone might fit through if they wanted to.

"Actually, I don't think this is it, not yet," Bruce concluded. "It looks too old. There's even a little bit of flowstone over there, where water has been dripping in. This isn't a recent collapse, it's an older boulder choke. The bad news is, it seems like the only way onwards is through it."

"Is it safe?" Natasha asked, crouched on the ground and peering into an opening between boulders.

"Well, like I said when we first got in, it's never really safe. You simply can't know. I don't see any signs of wear, so it's entirely possible no one's been here before. We'll need to be careful. Look where you step and what you touch. Watch out for anything that might be loose."

"I think it's better if we don't all go in at once, then. I'll take a shot at it first, you wait here," Steve decided.

He picked the largest, most promising opening between rocks that he could find, and crawled in. He didn't get very far – it was little more than an alcove surrounded by impenetrable walls. He returned to the others, and tried something else, a near-vertical hole this time. He managed to advance for several minutes, chimneying up, then squeezing through a slot between boulders, but all too soon, he found the way blocked again.

After a few more failed attempts, he let Natasha and Bruce try it out as well. Maybe Natasha's smaller size or Bruce's experience would help them find something that Steve had missed.

Fifteen minutes later, they had explored every nook and cranny that they could find, and they were no closer to making their way through the boulders.

"It's entirely possible that there just is no way through," Bruce said glumly. "In which case the only thing we can do is to turn around and head back to the main passage."


	7. Chapter 7

Tony rested his head against the wall of the tunnel, struggling to get his wind back. If just dragging himself a couple of feet across the passage had left him feeling like this, he wouldn't bet on his chances of ever reaching those boulders. But he was done sitting and waiting.

Every single plan he'd come up with required him to move around at least a little. Want to build a big antenna? He'd need to be able to place the components here and there. Want to blow stuff up? He'd need to be able to get out of the way of falling rocks. He wasn't going to get anything done without moving, and he just had to try something.

When he'd eventually gathered the strength and willpower to give it a shot, he braced his left shoulder against the wall, and pushed himself up on his uninjured left leg. It dawned on him then that this was an even worse idea than he'd thought. Sure, the suit had acted as a sort of a splint when he had been on the ground, but now, it was also a heavy weight pulling at the injury, and since the suit was as badly damaged as his leg from the knee down, it wasn't as stable as it would normally have been.

Leaning on the wall as much as he could, his good leg so shaky that he wasn't sure it would've held his weight without the suit, he tried to hobble forwards.

The sideways-pointing toes of his right boot caught on something, some pathetic little ridge on the cave floor, and that was all it took.

He collapsed to the ground, with a sickening feeling of bones shifting in ways they were definitely not meant to, and oh God and Thor and Loki and all their ridiculous Viking-helmeted relatives, he'd had no idea his leg could hurt so much more than it already had, but right here was solid empirical evidence that it could.

All the resolve he'd regained, all his determination, melted away in that moment, bled out. He couldn't even take one step. Who was he kidding – he wasn't going to do anything. He was done for.

Jarvis was getting all worked up again. "Sir! You need to put pressure on the bleed, right now!"

He was in way too much pain to think straight, but Jarvis was so persistent that he couldn't ignore it completely. He could see that his shin was bleeding copiously now, the makeshift bandaging soaked and blood dripping on the ground. He must have nicked something major when he fell.

He'd run out of luck, and he was going to die here, alone, in the dark.

"Do it, sir! Now!" Jarvis kept insisting.

It was pointless, because he knew he wasn't going to get out, at best he might prolong his suffering, but he did it anyway, just to please Jarvis. He bent forwards, positioning his fingers where most of the blood seemed to be coming from.

"You'll need to lock the suit in place," he said softly.

"Affirmative."

He pushed his metal-covered fingers into the injury, leaning forwards with all his weight, and his vision was starting to fade at the edges, and he would have reflexively pulled his hands away, but he couldn't, because like he'd asked, Jarvis had frozen the suit where it was and he couldn't move his hands, and oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, it hurt so much –

One part agony, one part desperation, he opened his mouth and screamed.

* * *

The scream was so raw that it didn't even sound human, which made it all the more horrible that Steve could recognize it as Tony's voice.

The way sounds echoed in the passage, it was difficult to be entirely sure where it had come from, but really, the only possible place it could have come from was between or behind the boulders they had been trying and failing to find their way through.

Before Steve had time to utter a thing aside from a shocked gasp, Bruce growled. And then he wasn't Bruce anymore.

The Hulk's huge green figure filled most of the cave passage. The shreds of the overalls Bruce had been wearing were hanging from his massive limbs. His helmet had fallen off somewhere, far too small for the Hulk's skull.

"HULK SMASH BOULDERS!"

Both Steve and Natasha went for the Hulk's thick arms, each grabbing one, for what little good it did.

"Hulk, no! Bruce! I know you're still in there! You said it yourself that some of those boulders might be loose, you can't just smash your way through them, you could hurt Tony!" Steve yelled at the monster frantically.

Surprisingly, the Hulk didn't try to shake them off, although he could've easily done that. "NO WORRIES. TIN MAN WILL BE SAFE," he rumbled, his voice as level as it could ever be.

"Steve, I think he's got this," Natasha said, smiling a little.

"I think you might be right," Steve said.

Only when they'd both let go of the Hulk's arms, the green beast stepped closer to the boulders, and began shifting them. Not smashing, not throwing, but carrying, taking great care to choose ones that wouldn't make the rest of the pile collapse. None of the boulders were too heavy for the Hulk to carry, and the slowest part was that he needed to rearrange the ones he'd removed in other parts of the cave passage to keep them out of the way.

"I had no idea he could do that," Steve said, in awe.

"I had a hunch, but I wasn't quite sure either," Natasha commented.

Steve considered joining in, because he would've been able to lift most of those boulders as well, but in the end, he figured it wouldn't be a good idea to get in the Hulk's way.

* * *

Tony was hallucinating. Trough the pain-filled daze that clouded his head, he was sure he heard the Hulk's voice booming in the cave passage. That couldn't possibly be real. No one in their right minds would bring the Hulk underground. That would've been way too reckless even for him, and reckless was his middle name. What an odd hallucination for his dying mind to pick.

The next thing he heard was an all too familiar sound of shifting rocks, and instinctively, he cringed inside the suit, waiting for something to hit him. Right now, he would almost have welcomed it. Getting flattened by a boulder would've probably been less painful than this, and a lot quicker. But though the sound didn't stop, nothing fell.

And was that Steve's voice?

* * *

The Hulk was working his way methodically through the right hand side of the passage, going back and forth ferrying rocks. Bruce's experience of moving in caves must still have been there, at the back of the monster's primitive mind, because the Hulk was stepping more carefully than Steve had ever seen him, taking care not to place his weight on anything that might not bear it.

They were advancing, but there were lots and lots of boulders, the blockage stretching on and on. The way Tony's voice had sounded, they knew that whatever had happened to him, he needed help, fast. Following right behind the Hulk, Steve could tell the green beast was getting frustrated, and a little careless. Twice, Steve had to step in to catch a boulder that the Hulk had accidentally knocked loose, to prevent a chain reaction of collapsing rocks.

Finally, he could see a clear space beyond two boulders that were on top of one another, and as soon as the Hulk had lifted the top one out of the way, Steve leaped past him and over the remaining rocks to the passage beyond.

Beyond the boulders, the tunnel looked identical to the one they'd been following all along, but for a single, all-important difference.

Lit by the blue glow of his suit's arc reactor, sitting against a wall in an odd, hunched posture with his hands on his shin, was Iron Man.


	8. Chapter 8

**Author's Note:** Time for the usual disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. Technically, I do work in a related field these days, but it's about as close to emergency medicine as knitting is to sword fighting. Then again, none of the characters are MDs either.

* * *

"Tony? Tony!"

Steve rushed to Tony's side, his mind flooded with relief and worry at the same time. They'd found him, and he wasn't crushed under tons of rocks. Oddly enough, Steve couldn't even see any signs of the cave-in, so Tony must have moved away from it on his own. But he obviously wasn't all right, because he wouldn't be sitting still against a wall like that if he were.

As soon as he got a bit closer, Steve could see why Tony's hands were on his leg – the pool of blood on the ground was an obvious clue. The coppery smell of it completely drowned the ever-present earthy scent of the cave air. Steve couldn't make out what the injury itself looked like, because Tony's gauntlets covered half of it and the rest was bandaged with dark fabric.

He went straight for the emergency release of Tony's helmet, and pulled it off, holding his breath, dreading that they might've reached him too late.

Tony turned his eyes towards Steve's, blinking and squinting in the bright glow of Steve's headlamp. In that cold white light, Tony's face seemed completely devoid of color, and every line on it screamed that he was in a lot of pain. The smile that he was obviously going for looked far more like a grimace.

"Hi, Cap. What took you so long?" he asked.

Steve felt like crying, because he was so incredibly relieved that Tony was alive, and because even though it was meant as a joke, it really had taken them far too long.

"I'm so sorry we couldn't reach you sooner, but it's going to be all right now," he said, his voice coming through a bit shaky. "We're going to get you out of here."

He raised his hand to Tony's cheek, needing the tangible proof that he was really there. Tony's skin felt cold, and the way he was breathing in rapid shuddering gasps clearly wasn't right.

While Steve's eyes were completely fixed on Tony, someone landed heavily on Tony's other side. To his amazement, Steve saw it was Bruce, already back in regular human form, with Natasha hovering close by. Bruce was holding a casualty blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and Steve could guess he wasn't wearing much of anything under it. He had his helmet on again, but it was lopsided – the chinstrap had been severed when he'd transformed.

As tired as he must have felt, Bruce also seemed entirely focused on Tony. Steve backed away to give him room to work, and he reached for the pulse point at Tony's neck right away. He didn't look happy with what he found.

"Tony, is your suit's temperature regulation intact?" Bruce asked.

"Should be," Tony said, his voice strained, as if just talking was almost too much for him. "Jarvis, loudspeakers."

"Very well, sir," the familiar disembodied voice of the AI suddenly echoed in the cave passage. "Dr. Banner, the suit's systems are functioning within normal parameters, and have protected Mr. Stark from hypothermia. However, as I'm sure you suspect, he is in shock. This is due to blood loss from a compound fracture of the right tibia, and associated injuries."

"Damn," Bruce said softly. "Any other major injuries I should be aware of?"

"He has also suffered extensive bruising to his chest and back, which is causing some respiratory depression. Pulmonary contusions are impossible to rule out with current diagnostic capabilities."

Bruce nodded, looking serious. "All right. We can deal with this. Steve, I'll need access to a vein, you need to take the armor off one of his arms. Tony, keep pressure on that bleed until I say you can stop. Natasha, I hope you've got my pack somewhere?"

Steve had not had the presence of mind to grab Bruce's pack when he'd Hulked out. Luckily, Natasha had. As Steve started to work on prying off the armor covering Tony's left arm, Natasha handed the muddy, battered waterproof pack to Bruce.

"Thanks," Bruce said, starting to sort out the medical supplies they'd brought. He went on speaking without looking up. "I've got another favor to ask of you, Natasha: you should head back to the surface right away. Hopefully Clint has made contact with the local rescue authorities by now. Tell them where we are and what the situation is. Let them know we're going to need a stretcher, and oxygen, and if there's any chance of getting plasma or blood, that would be invaluable. You're A positive, right?" he asked Tony.

"That is correct," Jarvis answered on his creator's behalf.

"You've memorized my blood type," Tony mumbled at Bruce. "Not sure if sweet or creepy."

"I've also memorized your drug allergies and baseline vitals, but not your birthday, so I'd go for creepy," Bruce quipped.

Natasha had stood up straight, ready to dash towards the surface. "Anything else you need?"

"The most important thing is to get him out of here as soon as possible, so he can get proper medical care. And that's going to be easier and faster if we've got more people working on it. Go. Run."

Wasting no time on goodbyes, Natasha headed in the direction they'd come from, practically flying over the boulders.

* * *

For the first few minutes, Tony was still convinced he was dreaming, because it was all too good to be true. Steve was there, and Natasha was there, and Bruce was there, too, not the Hulk anymore but Bruce, half-naked – not bad at all for a terminal hallucination, though he sure as hell did wish it'd stop hurting so much.

Once Bruce launched into full field medic mode, it became clear enough that it was all quite tangible and real.

As soon as Steve had stopped messing with the suit's left arm, Bruce told him he'd need to watch over the bleed instead of Tony, and told Tony to let go with his right hand as well. Tony really didn't want to move it, because he knew it would hurt even more, but Jarvis was in league with the others, so he didn't have any say on the matter. He groaned, trying to fight back the tears, as Steve guided his blood-crusted right gauntlet off the injury with one hand. Steve's other hand rested soothingly on the now exposed skin of Tony's left arm.

Tony didn't want to look at the fracture anymore. He knew it would be worse than it had been, he could feel that clearly enough. He didn't need to know the details. He leaned his head back, his eyes closed. He was shivering, and he felt thirsty. Perfect case example of shock.

By the feel of it – a new, light, tearing sort of pain in his leg – Bruce or Steve or both were now removing his makeshift undersuit bandaging.

"That's surprisingly clean, I guess you've washed it? That's very good, and it's actually clotted quite well. I'm pretty sure it saved your life that you had the sense to put pressure on it," Bruce was addressing Tony now.

"Not me. Jarvis," he breathed, eyes still closed.

"Then you can thank that AI for saving your life. Let's get him lying down, Steve."

There was some more excruciating pain as they shifted him away from the wall and flat on his back. Was that keening sound coming from him? That was a bit humiliating.

"Now, Steve, here, bandage the entire injured area with these," Bruce was telling Steve. "Pressure right there, otherwise just lightly over it, don't touch anything more than you absolutely need to. We'll consider the next steps when he's a little more stable."

Next, Bruce grabbed Tony's bare arm and started fitting an IV line. The sting of the needle was a sharp pointy contrast to the continuous pain of Steve touching his leg – damn it, Steve touching his leg should be a good thing, it shouldn't be a thing that made him pinch his eyes closed even tighter, struggling not to weep.

The morphine that followed not long after was the most welcome thing in all the world since he'd seen Steve's face haloed by that overly bright headlamp. It rapidly took the edge off the pain, though he was still hurting way more than he would've liked. He'd had morphine for other injuries before, and he could remember it working much better than this.

"Bruce, are you holding back on the drugs?" Tony complained, his voice coming through embarrassingly whiny.

"Sorry, I can imagine it's not enough, but I can't risk giving you more. With the combination of shock and a chest injury, a larger dose would not be a good idea."


	9. Chapter 9

By the time Steve finished bandaging Tony's leg, Bruce was done setting up the IV. Now, he was just sitting next to Tony, holding the drip bag up. He seemed deep in thought, his face almost as pale as Tony's, though that might have been because of the light.

"I can hold that," Steve offered, and held out his hand. "If there's nothing else really urgent that you need to do, you should take two minutes and get dressed. There are spare clothes in my pack."

"There's nothing about the situation that isn't urgent," Bruce said, allowing Steve to take the drip bag but not moving from his spot. He reached for Tony's carotid artery again, his face unreadable. "The saline will hopefully stave off the worst of the shock for a while, but it simply can't replace the blood he's lost."

"Oh, don't be like that, Bruce! I'm much better already," Tony said. He seemed to be breathing a bit easier now, and the lines of pain on his face were less severe.

"And that would be the morphine talking," Bruce added. "But you're right, Steve, it won't take me long to get dressed, and it's not like I can start carrying him out of the cave wearing nothing but this," he flapped the olive-green, aluminum-lined blanket covering his shoulders.

They didn't stop talking and making plans while Bruce went on to slip into the technical underwear and spare overalls Steve had been carrying just in case Tony would need them. He still might – Steve wasn't quite sure how they should go on.

"I'd like to keep him in the suit for as long as we can," Bruce said, clearly thinking about the same thing. "It keeps him warmer than any clothes would, and Jarvis provides the best medical monitoring we could hope for."

"The combination of him and the suit is quite heavy," Steve said thoughtfully.

"Are you calling me fat?" Tony interjected. "I'm big boned. With an exoskeleton."

Steve smirked, but didn't comment on that. "I can carry him all the way to the start of that really low passage, but the suit will have to come off there."

"Yes," Bruce agreed. "And I haven't yet figured out how we're going to get him through that squeeze without hurting him a whole lot."

"Don't like the sound of that," Tony said. He definitely seemed to be feeling better, actively participating in the conversation.

"It's not going to be fun, but it's the only way out that we know of," Bruce said, pulling on the sleeves of the overalls and closing the zipper. "Before we can go anywhere, though, we'll have to decide what we're going to do about that leg."

Tony made a face. "Don't like the sound of that either."

"I'm sure it'll be fine, Tony," Steve said, giving Tony's bare arm a reassuring squeeze. He stood up and glanced at Bruce, raising his eyebrows.

Bruce stepped closer to Steve, to talk right into his ear in a very low voice, obviously hoping to keep the details from Tony.

"I'm of two minds here," Bruce said. "You know full well I'm not a medical doctor. This isn't my field of expertise. I don't like the idea of trying to set his leg when we're this far from proper medical care. But it could help with the pain, which would make moving him easier for everyone. It would also give better chances for the bone to heal properly. It may have taken us only two hours to get here, but it could well be close to a day before we can get him out. That's a long time for his leg to be so badly out of line."

Bruce sounded like he was trying to convince himself as well as Steve.

"What's the worst that could happen?" Steve asked, lowering his voice as much as he could. Tony's eyes were closed, and it was impossible to tell if he was listening in.

"Ultimate worst case scenario," Bruce said, barely moving his lips, "Would be another serious bleed. He would not survive that. Other than that, we could cause damage that could cost him his leg, though that may be a lost cause anyway."

Steve swallowed, trying very hard not to think of the field amputations he had seen in the war.

"But it could make him feel better?" he asked.

It was plain enough that Tony was in an inordinate amount of pain despite the drugs Bruce had given him, and even the slightest touch or movement made it worse. Carrying him through the difficult terrain like this would be nothing short of torture.

"If we get it right, yes," Bruce said, deep in thought. "Here's what I think we should do: let's try it once, just once, very carefully. If it doesn't seem to go, then we'll splint it as it is."

Steve just nodded. By this time, he realized the drip bag he was holding was just about empty.

"He could probably use another liter, but that's all I had with me," Bruce said regretfully, taking the bag from Steve and moving in to detach it from Tony's arm. "I really, really hope there's help coming our way from the surface."

Steve was acutely aware that it would take time for anyone to reach them. Natasha, fast as she was, would need at least an hour to get to the surface. Although she wouldn't have the route finding trouble they'd had while coming in, she would be going uphill, and climbing up the ropes would be slower than abseiling them had been. Then, assuming that there were people up there who could help, they'd need to sort things out and head back down, which could easily take another hour. And there were no guarantees help was coming at all.

* * *

Tony knew they were up to something. He had almost heard what they'd been saying, but not quite, only a few words here and there. Still, if they wanted to keep it from him, it couldn't be good. He felt a bit apprehensive when Bruce knelt close by, but apparently, he just wanted to talk, and not even to Tony.

"Jarvis, how are we doing?" Bruce asked.

"You're asking him and not me," Tony grumbled.

"Fine, can you give me your BP?"

He didn't have the HUD up, because he didn't even have the helmet on, so obviously, he had no clue. Anyway, shock meant it would be somewhere between low, very low and way too low.

"Between fifty and a hundred millimeters of mercury?" he ventured.

"Yeah, you'll need to be a bit more exact than that. Jarvis?"

"Blood pressure appears to have stabilized at 86 over 60. Current heart rate 120 beats per minute."

"Not great, but it'll have to do," Bruce concluded. "Okay. Steve, let's get his leg sorted out."

So, both Bruce and Steve attacked his leg, and it felt weird and not good at all, but he could handle it, distance himself from it. Bruce even went so far as to prod his foot – they had removed his boot at some point – muttering about foot pulses and asking if Tony could feel the touch here and there, and yes, he could, at least most of it anyway, and he didn't appreciate it at all.

Then, Bruce said a few ominous words to Steve: "I think it had better be you, you're stronger. I'll keep it steady and have an eye out for bleeding. Just take hold of it right there..."

Tony could feel Steve's strong fingers grasp his ankle firmly.

"Oh, no. No, no, no, I think that's a bad idea," he told the others, a touch of panic in his voice. "A terrible idea. Steve, don't –"

Then he regressed into just shrieking his head off, because goddamn it, Bruce really should have given him more morphine, it hurt nearly as much as when he'd tried to escape the cave-in and he'd been sure his leg was being torn apart, and maybe it was, now – he had thought they were going to set it but he hadn't actually looked at it himself, maybe it was a lot worse now and that was why they'd been whispering and they'd run out of options and were just going to cut it right off and -

As suddenly as it had started, it stopped, and oh, wow, it actually didn't feel half as bad anymore!

"Tony, oh my God, I'm so sorry, it's over now, it's all done, it's done," Steve was murmuring to his ear, one hand stroking his damp hair, cheek pressed against his.

"You did good, Steve," Bruce said from where he was crouching, obviously still refusing to leave the leg alone. "It's looking much better to me. What do you think, Tony?"

"Yeah," he said. He was trembling and his throat was hoarse from screaming, but seriously, wow. His leg felt better than it had ever since he'd first woken up in this ghastly place with the damn thing broken. "Yeah. Much better. Thanks, Steve."


	10. Chapter 10

Steve's hands were still shaking. He never, ever wanted to do anything like that again as long as he lived. Not to anyone, and particularly not to Tony. They way he'd been screaming, Steve had been sure Tony would never even want to talk to him again, but instead, he had actually thanked Steve. Thank goodness he hadn't botched it. Tony's leg was properly leg-shaped again, and securely splinted by Bruce.

Tony hadn't said much after saying thanks, and now he seemed to have fallen asleep, or unconscious. Worry skyrocketing instantly, Steve shook him a little and cupped his face.

"Tony?"

"Mmhhhmm, all awake," he muttered, sounding anything but.

"Bruce? He's getting sleepy."

"That's hardly surprising," Bruce replied. "He's exhausted and finally hurting a bit less. I think we can let him take a nap, Jarvis should alert us if anything untoward is going on."

"Indeed I will," the AI confirmed.

Steve wasn't entirely reassured, but he guessed they knew better.

"I've just about finished packing everything. I left out most of the ropes, we should still have enough in case we need them to get him up some of the climbs. We need to get a move on," Bruce said.

Tony did wake up properly when Steve lifted him off the ground.

"Whuh? What's going on?" he said, flailing a little in Steve's arms, but stopping as soon as he accidentally jarred his leg. "Ow, that still hurts. Put me down, this is ridiculous."

"Just stay still, Tony," Steve told him. "We're getting you out, that's what's going on. Unless you'd rather stay here?"

"That's not even funny. Giddy-up, then! Out!"

They had about thirty feet of easy passage to start with, and then they were faced with the path through the ancient boulder collapse that the Hulk had excavated for them. It hadn't been too difficult to pass earlier on, in the Hulk's wake. Now, it was like walking through a minefield.

Steve could easily support Iron Man's full weight, but there were plenty of challenges aside from that: he needed to keep Tony's leg secure, to move as smoothly as possible, to find steady footing, and to avoid accidentally making the pile of boulders collapse on top of them. Bruce was hovering close by, helping as much as he could. It was slow going, far slower than it had been when the Hulk had been digging through the blockage.

* * *

If this wasn't one of the strangest things Tony had ever been through, he didn't know what was. He was still wearing most of his suit, they'd even put on his helmet, and Captain America was carrying him, bridal style, through a collapsed heap of boulders that had been dug open by the Hulk.

He also felt pretty strange, physically. He was just, what, four feet above the ground, but when he kept his eyes open, looking at the wavering view through the HUD, he quickly started getting dizzy. Of course, he felt quite woozy just in general, and a few times he drifted off, only to wake up abruptly each time someone or something jostled his leg. Even though it didn't hurt quite as much anymore, it was still very uncomfortable, like he could feel the ends of bones rubbing against one another, which now that he thought about it was probably exactly what it was.

At one point, he realized he was lying on the ground, and he could hear rocks shifting. He looked around, and really didn't like the sight of all those boulders around him, and felt a bout of panic trying to surface through the drugged stupor. He tried to take as deep breaths as he could and did his best to keep his calm, because he didn't want Jarvis to start chiding him, especially not when the others were there too. Soon enough, Steve was back by his side, scooped him up, and they were on their way again.

Tony's perception of time must have been off, because it felt like they went on like this for days.

Later, when he opened his eyes again, there weren't quite as many boulders around him anymore, and the walls were solid. The way they were manhandling him through the cave would've been downright embarrassing if he hadn't been too lethargic to do anything on his own. There were parts where he was passed over a boulder with Steve on one side of it and Bruce on the other, and a few times, they even used ropes, with Bruce holding him in position and Steve hauling him up.

He complained a few times, but couldn't find it in himself to put very much effort into it. Mostly he was just hanging there and sliding in and out of consciousness. All in all, he really was behaving himself. Steve should be proud. And Jarvis too.

Jarvis, though, clearly wasn't too impressed, but started fretting at some point, and didn't even talk directly to Tony, since he still had the suit's loudspeakers at his use.

"Captain Rogers, Dr. Banner, I'm afraid I must notify you that Mr. Stark's vital signs are not holding within the safe range anymore."

They weren't? Tony had stopped paying heed to the numbers like, a week ago, when the others had found him. He tried to make sense of them, but they were all blurry in his eyes. He wasn't feeling any different, just tired, really tired. Maybe he should go to sleep again, Bruce had said earlier that it would be fine, hadn't he?

* * *

Steve gently placed Tony down on the first suitably clear stretch of cave floor that he could find, and opened the faceplate. Tony had been suspiciously quiet for most of the way through the bouldery passage. Steve had trusted Jarvis to let them know if there was anything to worry about –and now the AI had done just that.

Tony peered up at him with half-open, unfocused eyes. "We there yet?"

"Not quite. Just a little break. Don't worry, we'll be out in no time," Steve told him, doing his best to sound reassuring.

While Bruce got busy consulting Jarvis about the decline in Tony's vitals, Steve took note of where they were. He was sure they had almost reached the start of the low passage. If he recalled correctly, there would be a little climb up to it, perhaps ten feet, that hadn't been difficult coming down. Standing up and looking ahead, he could actually see it, around a hundred feet away. After that climb, they'd be in a passage that was too low for walking upright. Then, it would get too low for even crawling on all fours, low enough that Steve couldn't get through unless he emptied his lungs.

"This is bad," Bruce said, not even trying to cover how concerned he was. "He really needs a transfusion – he really needed one a few hours ago, he's not going to last much longer like this."

"But – we've been really careful, his leg isn't bleeding again, is it?"

"No, it's not. It's just that at this stage, he'd be getting worse even resting and doing nothing, and being constantly lifted and pulled and pushed around certainly isn't helping."

"You could give him my blood?" Steve offered. "I'm a universal donor."

"Of course you are, and the sentiment is admirable, but no. That would be far too risky. There's no way to know how he'd react to the serum," Bruce said, pinching his nose, looking grim. "I don't think there really is anything we can do. We could stop and let him rest and wait for help, but we don't know if that's even coming, so we'd be wasting time that he doesn't have. We'll just have to keep moving, keep a close eye on him, and hope for the best."

"We're almost at the low passage now," Steve noted. "He can't stay in the suit much longer."

"Oh hell. Oh shit. I had completely forgotten about that," Bruce said, the first time Steve heard him swear like that during the whole rescue effort. "Jarvis, you're not going to be able to monitor him if we take the suit off, will you?"

"Unfortunately no, Dr. Banner."

"He's not going to fit through in the suit," Steve said.

It was a simple fact and there was no getting around it. The suit's chest had a bigger circumference than Steve's, and it was solid metal, it would not give way like flesh and bone. Without the suit, Tony was probably around the same size as Bruce, and Bruce hadn't had as much trouble as Steve with the squeeze. Then again, Bruce had experience of such things, not to mention he didn't have bruising on his chest that was bad enough to mess with his breathing.

"He's not," Bruce repeated. "I know, I know. We'd better get rid of it now, while we've stopped anyway."


	11. Chapter 11

Working as fast as possible, Steve and Bruce got Tony out of his armor. They spent a minute debating whether or not they should leave the helmet on. Tony's head would be horribly unprotected without it, but with the faceplate closed, it was impossible to tell if he was conscious or even breathing. Then again, if they kept it open, it could easily get stuck in the low passage.

In the end, Steve solved the issue by just wrenching the faceplate off – not the first time someone had done that, and Steve was sure Tony would have complained loudly, except he was so out of it that he barely seemed to notice. Steve tossed the faceplate to the pile with the rest of the discarded pieces of armor. They were going to abandon most of it in the cave for the time being, because there was no point in dragging all that extra weight with them. Someone could come and pick up the pieces later.

The one thing Steve didn't even consider leaving in the cave was the arc reactor. It wasn't just that it was a powerful piece of technology that should not end up in the wrong hands, it was that he had grown so used to it being a permanent part of Tony that it felt extremely strange to see it detached like that. He placed it carefully in the one pack they were still carrying with them.

When they had stripped Tony down to his undersuit, they cocooned him in a casualty blanket, leaving just his face visible. It would hopefully keep him adequately warm. Again, Steve thought about how amusing and annoying Tony would've found all this, had he been lucid enough. Instead, the most Steve was able to get from him, with vigorous shaking and some shouting, was a glare and a grumble that sounded suspiciously like "Shut up, Steve."

Steve managed to lift Tony up the next climb quite easily, since there were good footholds. Bruce stood behind him, making sure he didn't fall back. Then, they were in the passage that would get gradually lower, and they couldn't carry on in the same way.

Bruce climbed up and moved closer to check Tony's breathing and pulse. He'd been doing that methodically every few minutes since they'd lost Jarvis's monitoring capabilities. Steve already missed knowing that the AI was constantly watching out for Tony.

"How should we go on?" he asked Bruce.

"There's really only one practical way I can think of, which is dragging him along the floor, one person at his feet, the other at his head. And we should move him feet first to make sure we don't compromise the circulation to his upper body."

The passage was sloping upwards, so that did make sense. Steve wouldn't have thought of it on his own. "What about the really tight bit?"

"Essentially the same thing, we'll just have to be very careful."

That sounded reasonable to Steve, and since they were short on time, he had no need to speculate about alternatives.

"I think you should go first, you're smaller, it'll be easier for you to work in that tiny space," Steve said.

"Fair point, and it's probably better you're the one who's by his face in case he wakes up," Bruce agreed. "Though that means you'll need to keep an eye on his vital signs, can you do that?"

"Sure."

"And just for the record, I hate doing this," Bruce added. "But it's not like we've got much choice."

In theory, it sounded simple enough. In practice, just moving Tony through the upwards-sloping hands and knees crawl was a challenge. Bruce going first meant that he was hauling Tony uphill, and Steve wasn't sure how much his attempts to push at Tony's shoulders actually helped. Not to mention that when Steve tried to fumble for Tony's pulse, just below the edge of his helmet, he was so anxious that he had trouble finding it although it was there, fast and thready, but still there, which was all they could hope for at this point.

They were moving at a snail's pace when they should've been running. Steve was stronger than Bruce, he should be the one doing most of the work.

"Bruce, we need to switch places," Steve said. There was still just enough space in the passage for them to do that.

Bruce seemed a bit surprised, but didn't argue. "Okay, if you think you can manage the squeeze."

"It won't be a problem." It wasn't himself Steve was worried about.

After a few rather acrobatic moves that put them very much inside each other's and Tony's personal spaces, they managed to swap places. It could have been funny if not for how dire the situation was. Now it was just awkward and much too slow.

They did move faster with Steve hauling, which meant that all too soon, the passage around him was so low that he couldn't keep going feet first. Had it been downhill, he might have been able to reverse through the constriction, but uphill, he knew it just wouldn't work. He would have to turn around for the tightest bit and go through it head first.

He pushed through the squeeze with pure willpower this time, not really caring if it hurt. He would probably have some bruising on his chest too thanks to that, but it would heal in no time, and was well worth it.

As soon as there was enough space in the tunnel, he turned around again, and started crawling back, reaching as far as he could with his hands. His head was just in the tightest part when he could feel the metal-lined polyester fabric of the casualty blanket between his fingers.

"Bruce?" he shouted. "I've got him."

"All right, good. He's still unconscious. Nice and easy, then."

Steve grabbed the blanket and wormed his way backwards, pulling as he went. He couldn't really watch out for Tony's leg, he just had to trust that the splint would be all right. It was tied together with Tony's good leg and both were wrapped in the blanket, so it was as secure as it could possibly be. Anyway, the important thing was to get him out alive, everything else was secondary.

He got Tony's feet through the constriction without too much trouble, his knees, his thighs, then his waist, and – of course, his chest just wouldn't go through it, because the passage was too damn tight. Steve tried tugging a bit harder, but Tony wasn't moving anywhere.

"Bruce, can you do something at that end? He's stuck."

"Okay, wait, I'll put his arms above his head, that might help."

* * *

Sleep was good. The few times Tony woke up, he always felt weird and sick and he didn't really understand what was going on, there were rock walls and people talking but the words made little sense to him, and he just ignored it all and closed his eyes again.

But now someone, something was crushing his ribs, grinding painfully against his bruised chest and back, and he couldn't sleep if he wanted to.

He opened his eyes, and it wasn't just his imagination. He wasn't just thinking that the walls were closing in on him because there was no way out, the walls had literally closed in on him – he was stuck in the cave, alone, in the dark, the walls had closed in on him, they were so tight around his ribcage that he couldn't breathe at all, he could feel his heart quiver against the rock, he had to get out of here, he couldn't take it, he was going to suffocate and die – and someone was tugging at his feet, wedging him there even tighter – why were they doing this to him?

* * *

Something struck Steve in the face. Shocked, he realized Tony had kicked him.

He could hear Tony complaining in a soft voice. "No" was really the only word Steve got from it, but obviously, Tony was scared and hurting, and Steve couldn't blame him. It wasn't easy to imagine a worse place to wake up than being stuck in this horrible passage.

"I'll push, you need to pull, he's already more than halfway through, there's no point in going back, let's just get him all the way there! We can deal with everything else after," Bruce shouted, sounding as upset as Steve felt.

So, Steve pulled again, quite forcefully this time, doing his best to ignore the panicked and pained sounds that Tony was making, although he hated himself for hurting Tony again, which he had sworn to himself he'd never do after setting his leg.

He wasn't quite sure, but he thought he felt something give – oh God, had he broken Tony's ribs? Then, Tony's chest and shoulders were through.

Tony had stopped struggling, and he was completely quiet now.

Steve pulled once more – and then Tony was stuck again. The goddamn helmet. They should've taken off the helmet. Steve could see Tony's head was sideways, like it had to be to fit through, but the Iron Man helmet was that critical bit too big, and it just wouldn't go.

"Bruce! Can you reach him? You have to take the helmet off!"

"I'm already on it!"

Steve was glad he'd gone through first after all. He would never have been able to maneuver the helmet off Tony's head in that ridiculously cramped space.

"All right, go, go, go!" Bruce shouted, his tone low and rough.

Steve pulled one last time, and without the helmet, there was plenty of space and he got Tony through just fine. He didn't wait for Bruce to catch up but went on dragging Tony through the passage, a few more feet, a dozen, until the passage was big enough that he could get up at a low crouch.

"Steve, check his vitals!" Bruce yelled urgently, and Steve realized his voice sounded all wrong, tight and strained in a way that could mean a world of trouble in this restricted space, but there was no time to even think about that right now.

Steve crawled over Tony, heedful of his leg and chest, and carefully tilted Tony's helmet-free head up and back to open his airways. His face was deathly pale, his eyes closed, and there was a bluish tinge to his lips.

Steve bent his cheek over Tony's mouth and nose, searching for the rapid, light breaths he'd found earlier, but this time, he couldn't feel a thing.


	12. Chapter 12

For a fraction of a second that seemed to go on for ages, Steve was too stunned to do anything, or to even feel anything.

Tony wasn't breathing.

Was this his fault? He hadn't exactly been gentle dragging Tony through the squeeze, had he caused this? Had he – killed Tony? The thought was so horrendous that he couldn't even begin to grasp it.

Moving awkwardly in the cramped space, he sought for the pulse at Tony's throat, willing him not to be too far gone – and he wasn't, thank God, Steve could still feel a faint flutter beneath his fingertips.

"Tony, come on! Tony! Wake up!" Steve shouted at him, moving a hand to his shoulder inside the blanket and shaking him gently, but it did no good.

There was just enough room that Steve could hold himself above Tony on his knees and one elbow, seal his nostrils with his fingers, his mouth with his lips, and breathe for him.

He was vaguely aware of the dragging sounds of someone approaching them along the corridor, but he couldn't stop. He waited to see if it had worked, it hadn't, Tony still wasn't breathing, and he had to keep trying.

The feel of Tony's lips, cold and completely slack and unresponsive against his, was horrifying.

After another four breaths and some more frantic yelling from Steve, Tony made a nasty gasping, choking noise, almost as awful as the scream they had heard through the boulder blockage so long ago.

Steve grabbed hold of his shoulder again. "Tony? Don't go back to sleep. Come on, wake up, breathe!"

Tony opened his eyes, wide and unfocused and terrified. He was breathing, but it sounded even worse than before, erratic and painful. Steve rubbed his shoulder soothingly.

"Steve?" Tony managed between gasps. "Ribs..."

"I know, I'm so sorry. The worst is over now, it's going to be all right," Steve said, feeling like the Hulk had punched him in the gut.

Speaking of which, Bruce was now crouched right next to them, still looking like himself, not green, though he was clearly quite shaken. The way he was breathing was the exact opposite to Tony, each inhale and exhale so deep and steady that he was probably counting seconds to keep them that way. It must have been an awfully close call.

"You okay, Bruce?" Steve asked him.

"Crisis averted. I'll manage," Bruce said tersely. "I should probably take a look at him," he nodded towards Tony.

What Steve really wanted to say was that Bruce should take it easy for a while, but they both knew that wasn't an option. Instead, Steve sat back so Bruce could get closer to Tony. Bruce opened the blanket a little wider, to get a proper look at his chest. The dark fabric of Tony's undersuit didn't look any different, but Bruce had barely touched it above his sternum when he groaned.

"I think I broke something," Steve said softly.

"Seems likely," Bruce said. "And there's nothing to be done about it here and now. We need to -"

They both froze as a completely unexpected sound echoed through the passage.

"Hello? Cap? Bruce?"

A woman's voice, Natasha's voice! It was possibly the most beautiful thing Steve had ever heard.

"Widow! We're here!" Steve shouted back.

"They're here, we've found them," Natasha said, the sound slightly muffled. She was clearly addressing other people who were behind her.

"Natasha? If you've brought oxygen, we could really use that right now," Bruce called out.

For the next few minutes, Steve had the feeling that he was completely in the wrong place, but there wasn't quite enough room in the passage for people to move past one another. Bruce told the rescue team behind Steve what he needed, and they handed things to Steve, who passed them on to Bruce. Soon, Bruce had placed an oxygen mask over Tony's face, and an IV in his arm. More than that he couldn't do in the restricted space, so it was time to start moving again.

Steve had no idea how many people were behind Natasha in the tunnel, because he was going backwards again, still hauling Tony by the blanket in the gently upwards-sloping tunnel. Bruce carried the oxygen and kept watch over Tony, who had slipped into unconsciousness once again.

Finally, after endless minutes in the low passage, Steve dragged Tony out of it, into the high, narrow canyon that was the main passage of the cave. Bruce followed, stepping out and standing up, the last one to exit the low tunnel. The cave rescuers surrounded Tony, and although Steve's instinct was to join them, he knew they didn't actually need his help.

He noticed that Bruce, who was still standing right in front of the tunnel they'd just exited, was wavering on his feet. Thanks to his quick reflexes, Steve managed to catch him before he fell. Steve guided Bruce gently to sit on the ground next to the nearest wall, and knelt by his side.

"Bruce? What's wrong?"

"Uh, sorry, it's nothing, I'm fine, really," Bruce replied, his eyes closed. He was rubbing at his temples just below the rim of his lopsided helmet, which he'd somehow managed not to lose.

There was no mistaking how drawn Bruce's face was, and there were blood stains on the sleeves of his overalls, and mud. There was so much mud all over him that it looked like he'd been swimming in it. Steve could imagine he would have looked the same way himself without the repellent coating of his costume.

"I'm just exhausted, and probably dehydrated, and low on blood sugar," Bruce went on. "If you count from when we started chasing that monster, we've been going for, what, at least fifteen hours now? And I've gone green twice, and came way too close to a third time. I'm so glad the rescue team caught up with us."

Steve glanced at the rescuers, who were currently cutting off Tony's undersuit to get a better look at his injuries. There was a sturdy-looking bright orange stretcher waiting close by. Natasha was talking to one of them in a language Steve didn't understand or recognize.

In total, there were at least twelve people there, crowding the narrow canyon. Some had very professional-looking gear, others had shabbier worn overalls and muddy old harnesses. All of them had large caving packs. Further along the passage, Steve could see even more lights. It was incredible that they'd been able to raise so many people in a matter of hours.

"Me too," Steve said to Bruce.

"You know," Bruce began softly, his expression somber. "When I took off his helmet, I realized he'd stopped breathing. I really thought we'd lost him, and there was nothing I could do. That's when I almost lost it."

Steve wouldn't admit it, would not say it aloud, but he had very nearly thought they'd lost Tony, too. Instead, he asked, "You think he's going to be all right now?"

"We're not out yet, and he's in very bad shape. We'll just have to hope for the best."

* * *

It was one of the better awakenings Tony had had during the day, but one of the strangest as well. For once, he wasn't hurting at all, and he was thoroughly cocooned in something soft and warm. He was swaying about a fair bit, and that might have made him dizzy, but right now, he felt so good in general that he didn't mind. He didn't have a care in the world. He felt like he was floating. He had to be drugged up to his ears. It was extremely nice.

He opened his eyes, and there were colors in the darkness around him, many blurs of bright colors, and bright lights all around, and countless voices that he couldn't recognize, speaking in languages that he didn't understand. So many people. What were they all doing here? Where was here, anyway?

The swaying stopped for a bit, and a face emerged above his. A face he did recognize.

He tried to greet Steve, just to find that he had an oxygen mask over his mouth and that his vocal chords didn't really want to cooperate anyway. His arms were pinned to his sides, too. Steve looked worried, and Tony wanted to show it was all right, but he was bundled up so thoroughly that he couldn't move a muscle. Eventually, he did manage to waggle his eyebrows a bit.

Steve must have noticed, because he grinned and brushed Tony's cheek with his fingers. "Just hang on, Tony. We're almost out." He looked to his side, away from Tony, and said, "I think he's doing okay."

Bruce's face appeared as well, and his hand, but instead of some soothing gesture – which would have taken Tony by surprise – he put his fingers on Tony's carotid to take his pulse. And Bruce was looking really, really tired, but he smiled, too.


	13. Chapter 13

The sheer number of cave rescuers, and their coordinated way of working in the difficult environment, were awe-inspiring to Steve. The Avengers had been steadily improving their teamwork, but they could definitely take lessons from these people. They made his and Bruce's rescue effort look inadequate and amateurish. It was nothing short of a miracle that the two of them had managed to bring Tony even this far in one piece. If you could say he was that – according to the Slovenian doctor who was the leading medic of the rescue party, Tony now had cracks in his sternum and two of his ribs in addition to the broken leg.

The thought crossed Steve's mind that had Tony had still had the arc reactor in his chest, getting him through that squeeze would have been even more difficult, and might have caused much worse damage. It had stood out a fair bit, after all. Yet another reason to be glad that it was gone.

With more medical supplies available and the surface not too far away, they had given Tony more painkillers, which had knocked him out pretty efficiently. Finally, he didn't seem to be hurting at all, his expression totally relaxed. Apart from the one time he had woken up and sort of tried to make contact, he had been completely out of it. He'd slept through the hours of difficult lifting and pushing and winching with ropes that it had taken to get him up the steep, narrow bouldery slope, as well as the many times they'd stopped so the medics could make sure he was still holding on.

Steve had offered to help carry the stretcher, and the rescuers had been happy to let him do that. It was challenging to fit enough people around it to lift it, and Steve could take care of one end of it on his own. Bruce had been staying at the end of the procession, with Natasha keeping an eye on him. He'd gotten some food and water from the rescuers, and had sworn to Steve that he was quite all right, but Steve could tell he was ready to drop, and it was all he could do to keep climbing.

Eventually, all that stood between them and the surface was the 120-foot entrance shaft. As they were approaching it, Steve started to worry how they would ever be able to fit Tony through the tight chimney that was the very last obstacle. The big, secure stretcher would never go through that, but without it, how could they protect him from even further injuries? He asked about it from the rescue team's doctor.

"Ah, this is not a problem anymore," she answered. "It is bigger now."

"Yeah, I know you said no digging, Bruce, but the geology experts topside thought it would be fine, so Thor made short work of it," Natasha added.

Bruce groaned. "I'm not sure I even want to know the details."

Steve could have kissed Thor right then, but the demigod had not descended into the cave, so he was spared for the time being.

This meant that getting Tony up the rope pitch was a fairly straightforward matter. Steve climbed up ahead of him, because he wanted to be waiting up there when Tony reached the surface.

* * *

When Tony woke up, the swaying had stopped again, and there was a hand on his shoulder. He forced his heavy eyelids to open, but Steve wasn't there. Instead, it was Natasha and Bruce, crouched by his sides. The hand currently touching him seemed to belong to Natasha, of all people.

He'd been seeing plenty of that frown on Bruce's forehead recently, but the look on Natasha's face was a bit unsettling. He didn't feel too bad – sure, he had trouble focusing his eyes and he couldn't really feel the toes of his right foot anymore, but that was to be expected, wasn't it? Still, Natasha never looked at him like that, with actual open concern in her eyes, no mask of cool detachedness, not a hint of "pull yourself together, Stark!" anywhere to be seen. He sort of wished he could take a picture of it. Then again, he'd live the rest of his life fearing her retribution if he did, so perhaps it was for the best that he couldn't.

"Just the home stretch left now," Bruce said to him. "We'll see you again on the surface."

* * *

The rope seemed to go on for longer than Steve would have expected, without any sign of the opening above. He looked up, confused. The rope was still going, but there was no daylight. It wasn't as if he could've accidentally taken a wrong turn – there were several ropes rigged into the entrance shaft by the cave rescuers, but they all lead out. Since there was nowhere else to go, Steve kept climbing.

When he reached the anchor point at the top, he finally understood what was going on: it was night outside, so it was dark there as well. They'd been underground well into the small hours.

He climbed up over the edge of the cave entrance, which was completely different now, a big circular pit instead of a small crack in the ground. There was scorched grass all around it, and the pale limestone was blackened here and there. Clint and Thor were standing by the side of the pit greet him.

Steve had never thought about it before, but the darkness outside the cave was completely different from the darkness inside the cave. Even beyond the circle of light created by the floodlights and headlamps of the rescue team, the darkness wasn't absolute. Steve could see the rocky outcroppings around them, and the moon and the stars high up in the sky. The air was crisp and clear. A dog was barking somewhere far in the distance. A few bats flitted by.

The rescue team had now started winching Tony up from the cave. Steve would have liked to help, but they seemed to be doing fine without him, so he settled for just waiting.

"So, how was it?" Clint asked.

"It was..." Steve began, but he felt completely at a loss for words.

How could he describe what they'd just been through? So many things had happened in the hours that had passed. He thought of the desperate search for the right passage and for the route through the boulders, of the all too low tunnel where going in, he had almost panicked, and going out, he'd almost lost everything, of the Hulk filling half the cave passage as he had started clearing away the boulders, of the sinking feeling when he'd seen Tony so still, alone in the dark, and smelled the blood on the cave floor, the unexpected joy of hearing Natasha's voice in the crawly passage...

There had been no villains, no monsters, no bad guys this time, but it had still been a very difficult mission. One where Steve hadn't been sure they would succeed.

"All right, stupid question, I guess," Clint said. Apparently, Steve's expression had been enough of an answer.

"And how fares our friend Anthony?" Thor asked.

Steve didn't have a good answer to that either. He knew the rescue team's medics had struggled to keep Tony stable while transporting him towards the exit, blood loss and shock still threatening to overwhelm his system. The doc had made no promises regarding his leg, she had only said that it would be up to the specialists. From the way she'd said it, Steve was quite anxious about it. She had also recited a long list of potential complications to Tony's injuries, some of them life threatening, that might only show up later on. And even if all went perfectly, it would take months for him to fully heal from this.

"He's still alive, and he's going to get better," Steve told Thor, for lack of a better answer.

As soon as the rescuers had maneuvered Tony up and over the edge of the entrance pit and detached him from the ropes, a few of the surface personnel pointed them towards the waiting medevac chopper. They didn't stop to unwrap him from the stretcher, but headed straight for it.

The chopper was a few minutes' walk away from the entrance because of the mountainous terrain. As they were rushing towards it, Steve following right by Tony's side, he realized that the landscape around them wasn't quite as dark anymore.

Tony had opened his eyes, and was looking past Steve. Despite the oxygen mask covering half his face, Steve could see he was smiling. It wasn't a forced smirk through the pain or a groggy, drugged grin, but a genuine, relieved smile that reached his eyes and lit up his face as brilliantly as the first rays of the morning sun he was gazing at.

* * *

The sun! He could see the sun! He had never been so happy to see the sun. The light hitting Steve's pretentious blue cowl was one of the loveliest things Tony had ever set eyes on.

After so many hours of darkness and pain and despair, he was back on the surface. He was out of that horrible hellhole.

He was finally safe.


	14. Chapter 14

Caves were Tony's least favorite environment in the world. Hospitals were a close second. And as soon as he came to, as fuzzy as his head was, he could easily tell he was in one. He didn't even need to open his eyes, just the feel of the not too soft sheets and the plastic smell of the oxygen mask and the steady beep of the heart monitor made it all too clear.

His throat was sore in a way that he'd learned to associate with intubation – and wasn't it swell that he'd gone through that enough times to recognize it – but hm, what was this – he raised his left hand to poke at some unexpected tubing in his neck. A central line? He must've really done a number on himself this time.

He only realized there'd been a nice warm hand clasping his right when it let go to catch his left.

"Tony? Better leave that alone."

Steve.

Tony opened his eyes, and the clinical shades of white and beige around him looked infinitely better with Steve in the middle of them in a form-fitting blue T-shirt that matched his eyes.

Since Tony's right hand was now free, he used it to pull the oxygen mask off his face. He had some serious trouble with his coordination, but he still got it before Steve could stop him.

"Hi," he said to Steve. Two letters, and even that sounded breathless. How pathetic was that.

"Hi," Steve said, bent closer to kiss his cheek, and made to put the mask back. "I think you'd better leave that alone, too. You're still recovering, you've got bruises on your lungs, it was quite bad for a while there."

Now it was Tony's turn to catch Steve's hand, curling his fingers around Steve's wrist. Of course, even if he hadn't been feeling weak as a kitten, Tony would never have held a chance against Steve's strength. Still, Steve stopped. It probably had more to do with the steady fixed stare Tony gave him.

"Where?" Tony asked. One-word sentences were all right.

"You're in the hospital, Tony."

Captain Obvious, Tony thought, but there were too many syllables in that for the amount of air he was willing to spend.

"Yeah," he just said. "Where?"

"Venice. Italy."

That took him by surprise, and the pause was long enough that Steve sneakily slipped the oxygen mask over Tony's nose and mouth again. All right, maybe Steve had a point and there was a reason he'd had it in the first place.

"It was Natasha's idea. It wasn't much further away than the nearest hospital, and she thought you'd appreciate it if the staff spoke a language that you know," Steve explained.

Tony answered with a nod. Good thinking from Natasha. He'd need to get her something nice. He would definitely have freaked out if he'd woken up in the middle of some painful medical procedure surrounded by people speaking in a language he couldn't understand. Almost as bad as waking up in a cave.

Waking up in a cave. With a broken leg. Shit. How had he not though about that right away? His leg. He could barely feel it, just a vague distant ache, maybe that was just the drugs, or maybe it wasn't, maybe it was a really bad omen.

There must've been a flash of panic on his face, because Steve quickly grabbed his hand again, gave it a solid squeeze, and asked, "What is it?" in his most worried tone.

Tony raised his head a little to take a look. There was an unnerving amount of metalwork around his right leg, but behind all of that, at the far end of his bed, he could see his toes.

He still had all his toes, he still had both his feet. Whew. That would make things so much easier.

"Tony? Do you want me to get someone? I should probably go get someone anyway since you're awake…"

Apparently he'd managed not to set off any alarms, because no one had come in running yet. Tony shook his head and pulled the oxygen mask off, but kept it in his hand. "I'm good," he said. Because he was. Better than he'd expected, really. A lot better.

"Others?" he asked, hoping that Steve wouldn't need him to elaborate.

"Thor wanted to see the canals, so he's cruising around with Natasha and Clint right now. Bruce, I think he's actually on the phone with Pepper, making arrangements for an air ambulance so we can get you back home as soon as possible."

Thor, in a gondola. In full armor, Mjolnir in hand, his cape billowing in the wind. Now, that was something. Not quite like the Hulk in a cave, but almost. Tony chuckled a little.

Yeah, he was good.

He put the mask on again and drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Steve glanced at the islands and canals of the city far below, shrinking away behind the small round window as the private air ambulance gained height. He had barely seen more of the place than Tony, since he'd spent most of his time in the hospital, on the mainland – first keeping watch while Tony slept through the worst of it, heavily sedated, then keeping him company when he was awake and more or less lucid.

The worst of it had been pretty bad.

Now, Tony was doing all right and getting better, and they were on their way home. Steve still felt terribly worried, despite the perfectly capable and fully equipped medical escort in the plane. Flying over the Atlantic, they'd be far away from the nearest hospital if Tony should suddenly take a turn for the worse – like the one soon after they'd arrived in Venice, when he'd very nearly stopped breathing again. On top of everything else that had been wrong with him, it had been a very close call. Once they'd figured out what was going on and managed to stabilize him, the doctors had assured Steve that pulmonary contusions generally resolved in a matter of days and wouldn't leave any lasting damage. It had still been scary enough to give him bad dreams.

Tony, himself, didn't seem too worried. He spent the first hour of the flight on the phone with Pepper, and the next few with Bruce by his bedside, discussing the technical details of what he wanted to do about his leg. After that, he went to sleep, and slept for four hours straight.

As always, Steve waited by his side, dozing, and was right there when Tony woke up.

Tony blinked groggily, but his eyes instantly found Steve's. He was frowning a little. "Steve, you know, you don't need to feel guilty," he said, out of the blue, as if taking up some conversation that they hadn't been having. He no longer sounded out of breath when he spoke, although he still had a nasal cannula for supplemental oxygen.

"Tony? What on Earth are you talking about?" Steve said, confused.

"Don't get me wrong, I love it that you're always there when I wake up. It's just the way you look at me, every single time. Like it's your fault I got injured in the first place."

"I –" Steve stammered. Was he that easy to read? "Yeah, well, all right, maybe I do feel guilty. How could I not? I hurt you back there. Sure, it was to get you out, but it could've been avoided. You wouldn't have those cracked ribs…"

"Steve. You do realize those are the least of my worries? The lung injuries are from the cave-in, not from that tight passage. Yeah, it sucked. Yeah, I might have a few nightmares about it. Still, you had to do it, and you got me out of there. That's all that matters. So, stop fretting and kiss me."

Steve moved in to do just that, relishing the feel of Tony's lips, warm and alive against his.

* * *

The following day after they'd returned home, Tony fixed his leg. The actual procedure took less than an hour.

Back in Venice, the doctors had told Tony that the first surgery was only the beginning of a long process that, with several more operations, some luck and a lot of hard work, just might give him a functional leg again, though not quite the way it used to be. There had been damage not just to the soft tissue and the bone, but to the nerves and blood vessels as well, and frankly, it was a miracle that they had been able to save it at all. Obviously, Tony was not going to settle for that.

Steve didn't like the Extremis virus. It wasn't like his own healing factor, an accelerated but otherwise normal healing process. Tony said that it was hacking the body's natural healing and as such, it actually was exactly the same thing as the super soldier serum, but that just didn't ring true. Extremis was something volatile and dangerous. Even Tony couldn't deny that – it could make people explode, of course it was dangerous! Although Tony had tweaked it so that he could use it in a limited, controlled manner, only to fix this one thing and be done with it, he did admit it was a last resort and not something he'd ever want to repeat, and wouldn't recommend to anyone. At least not before several more years of research.

Tony had only fixed his leg. He hadn't dared use Extremis to fix the fractured bones in his chest, not when he'd already used the virus in the same part of his body not too long ago. They were much less serious anyway, and should heal well without extra tricks. So, as much as Tony tried to convince Steve that Extremis was perfectly safe, Steve could see that Tony had his misgivings as well.

The bottom line was, Tony had fixed his leg, and less than two weeks after they'd crawled up from the depths to witness the magnificent sunrise in the mountains, he returned to the Tower, weak, tired, hunched and guarding his ribs, but without as much as a limp.

* * *

"Everything seems clear," Bruce said, looking up from the microscopy pictures on the screen. "No signs of anything Extremis-related in any of the blood or tissue samples."

"Good, good. Nothing like knowing I'm not going to spontaneously combust or start setting things on fire," Tony said.

Of course, he had been pretty sure that the protocol he'd developed would work. He'd used it before on his chest and it had been fine. But it was biological, which meant it was finicky, with all too many basic science details missing from the puzzle, so one could never be too certain. There could always have been some obscure difference in gene expression or epigenetics or immunology or whatnot that might've messed things up.

"You can tell Steve to stop worrying about it now," Bruce added.

Tony made a face. "Or better yet, you can tell him. I've told him sixteen times. I've been counting. He doesn't believe it when I say it."

"I can't blame him, really. You didn't see yourself down there."

Tony couldn't remember all that much about the details himself. Everything that had happened after the others had found him in the cave was a bit hazy, as was a good part of his time in the hospital in Italy. What he did remember was that he'd been certain he was about to die, more than once, so he could tell it had been pretty bad.

"I wouldn't have made it out of there without you, you know," Tony said, in a sudden bout of sincerity. "Steve may have been the one who kept me sane, but really, you're the one who kept me alive. Well, you and Jarvis, but anyways. Thanks, Bruce."

He put out his hand to shake Bruce's, but halfway there, he realized it actually felt way too formal and totally not right at all, and stepped closer and went for a hug instead.

Bruce patted his back a bit awkwardly, but he looked quite happy when Tony pulled away.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** I originally planned this fic to be 14 chapters long, but I ended up writing one more than that. So, the next chapter will be the epilogue, and the end of this story. :)


	15. Epilogue

For the hundredth time, Steve wondered if they were making a terrible mistake.

He'd never seen Tony quite like this. When Tony was anxious, he'd just start talking even more than usual, maybe fidget a little. Now, if he hadn't been staring intently at his toes instead of a glazed, unfocused look, Steve would've thought he was having a flashback, because that was pretty much the only time he'd be so still and subdued.

It had actually been Steve's idea. He had talked about it with Bruce first, several times, and they'd gone back and forth about whether it was a good one, or absolutely awful. Bruce had once again reminded Steve that he wasn't a specialist in any field of medicine, psychiatry included. Nevertheless, he had then ventured to say that probably the worst thing that could happen would be a panic attack, which could be nasty, but not actually physically damaging, now that Tony was almost entirely healed from his underground ordeal.

Steve had, of course, known that Tony would not say no if he threw it out as a challenge. His pride wouldn't let him. So, Steve had tried to make it as offhand and as easy to refuse as he could.

"Bruce has been talking about going back to visit this cave he used to go to in Virginia. Sounds like a nice place, mostly just walking and pretty stalactites and cascades and things," Steve had begun.

Tony hadn't even looked up from whatever he'd been tinkering with. "Good for him."

"…and he asked if we'd like to go with him."

That had definitely caught Tony's attention. His hands had frozen in place, and he'd gaped at Steve, his eyes huge, his brows halfway up his forehead.

"Of course, I told him it's a bad idea…"

"Okay," Tony had said, softly at first.

"Tony, we really don't have to go if you don't want to."

"No, no. Let's do it," he'd said, more confidently, his expression becoming determined and stern – more Iron Man than Tony Stark. He had taken it as a challenge, after all. Steve should've known.

"Maybe third time's the charm," Tony had added, with one of those practiced smiles that always looked fake to Steve.

So, here they were, standing at the entrance. It looked the way Steve thought a cave entrance should look: not some dismal little crack in the ground, but a proper yawning hole in a cliff face, with some vines hanging here and there, and a nice even floor.

"Do you still want to do this?" Bruce asked, standing a few paces in front of them, wearing the shabby overalls, helmet and light he'd borrowed from his old caving buddies.

Tony finally lifted his gaze from his toes to look at Bruce, a thin smile on his lips. "Sure."

He had, of course, wanted to do this properly, and had converted an old, out of use Iron Man helmet into a lightweight thing he could use for this excursion, complete with a lamp that was as bright as the sun. Instead of overalls, he wore one of his many undersuits, sleek and futuristic-looking. Steve had settled on a set of headgear and clothing from their own stores, originally from SHIELD, dark and militant compared to the two others.

"Remember, you've got the safeword," Steve reminded Tony.

Tony rolled his eyes. "This is an afternoon stroll, not a BDSM scene. I won't need a safeword."

Still, when they took their first steps into the perpetual twilight of the entrance, and Steve offered his hand to Tony, Tony grabbed it and squeezed his fingers so hard it was a little painful. He was quiet again, too, except for his shaky breathing.

* * *

What the hell had he been thinking, this was stupid, he should not be here, oh shit, any minute now he was just going to run out screaming and it would be the most awkward and humiliating thing ever – except he was with Steve and Bruce.

Steve and Bruce had both seen him at his worst, many times over. They'd dragged him through That Cave when he'd been too sick to put two words together, and they'd seen and heard him cry and scream and whimper with intolerable pain, and so out of it with heavy duty painkillers that he'd just been sleeping and drooling, and, just seen him be a complete wreck all around. They knew how bad it had been, and they wouldn't judge him. No matter what happened, there was nothing to be ashamed of.

He concentrated on keeping his breathing steady, and on Steve's hand in his. Steve's fingers were warm and solid. Surprisingly enough, Steve had kept the fussing to a tolerable minimum before the trip, giving Tony the space that he needed, only offering support when he clearly wanted it.

Tony risked taking a look around. There was still some daylight filtering to the entrance chamber they were in, and it was big, much bigger than anything in either of those two other caves Tony did not want to think about. The floor rose a little towards the back of the chamber, and there were some boulders on the ground, but they definitely looked solid, with some moss growing on them. He could do this, he could do this, it was all right.

Bruce was walking a few feet ahead, and stopped at the far end of the chamber, to open a sturdy metal gate that had been set in the rock. Behind it, the cave continued as a much narrower passage, one where they would have to go in single file. Tony had known to expect that, they had talked the whole thing through several times before coming here. Still, when he gazed into the depths of that narrow, dark, rocky space, he felt his breath catch in his throat and his heart skip uncomfortably.

"You know, I'm not actually claustrophobic," he said, more to himself than to the others. His voice sounded high-pitched and nervous in his ears. "I wouldn't be able to wear the suit if I were. I just really, really don't like caves."

"I think you might like this one, though. And you'll be fine. It's not going to get much tighter than this, and the passage opens up again soon," Bruce reassured him, obviously seeing the impending panic on his face. "Do you want to go first, or between us, or would you rather be the last?"

"Between would be good."

Bruce led the way further into the cave, and Tony followed, still holding on to Steve's hand. The narrowest part was at the beginning, where they actually needed to walk sideways to fit through comfortably. It wasn't difficult, but it definitely wasn't enjoyable, either. Luckily, the passage soon grew a little wider, so that they could walk normally.

With Tony's light as powerful as it was, the narrow tunnel was as bright as day. The walls seemed to be more of a light brown or beige color than the darker shades that he associated with The Cave and That Cave, and – were they actually glimmering a little?

He stopped to stare at the walls, anxiety momentarily forgotten. "Glitter on the walls, Bruce? What's this, My Little Pony?"

Bruce turned around, grinning. "Oh, this is nothing, it gets even better. Just you wait."

"It's very pretty already," Steve noted, and repositioned their hands so that their fingers were intertwined. Tony realized that was only possible because he'd finally, subconsciously loosened the crushing death grip he'd had.

Just as Bruce had promised, the narrow, ridiculously glittery passage only went on for another couple of hundred feet before it broke through into a massive chamber. Maybe Tony's sense of perspective was thrown off by the unfamiliarity of the view, but the space seemed large enough that he could've fit his entire Malibu mansion in there. It was full of all sorts of rocky formations, growing from the floor, hanging from the ceiling and running down the walls, in all sizes and shapes one could imagine, the biggest ones easily taller than Steve. The floor sloped down in gentle steps, all smooth and round curves, nothing sharp, no boulders. Water was flowing down the steps in small ripples, following a series of shallow pools, ending in a larger one at the lowest point of the chamber.

Steve had stepped closer to put his arms around Tony, and Tony leaned back against him, suddenly feeling warm and safe and content. Yeah, this wasn't bad at all. This was actually, honestly beautiful, in a strange, alien way, a landscape unlike anything he'd seen anywhere else.

He could deal with this. He was actually feeling – normal, or better yet, pretty good. Nothing hurt, he wasn't short of breath, he wasn't reliving some terrors from the past, he was okay. He was in a cave, and it was perfectly fine. This was new.

"It's amazing," Steve said, obviously awestruck. "It's wonderful."

"It is, isn't it? The only reason it's so unblemished and hasn't been turned into a showcave with a concrete floor and electric lights is that it's a relatively recent find that's been kept under wraps," Bruce explained. "Usually, only research groups are allowed in here. You're lucky you had me making the arrangements."

"It's not bad, I'll give you that," Tony said, and pointed at a particular curved stalagmite sticking up from the ground. "That one's a bit obscene, though."

"Tony! Don't ruin it," Steve exclaimed, but he did chortle a little.

"Come on, you can't say you don't see it! Seriously, you don't even need to use your imagination. That's an R-rated piece of calcite right there. So, Bruce, did you ever do it in a cave?"

Bruce pulled a face and shook his head. "You know, caves are wet and muddy and cold, and the last environment in the world that I'd pick for sex."

He must've caught up on the look Tony was giving Steve, then, because he went on, "Anyway, there's this extremely interesting muddy crawl at the far end of this chamber that I'd like to explore, just for old times' sake. Doing the whole loop will take me about an hour. You can stay here. Just, please remember, delicate environment, restricted access, research groups. Try not to break anything."

"Do you realize what you've just said? Did you do that on purpose?" Tony flashed Bruce his widest grin. "You can definitely trust me on that, Dr. Banner. I have absolutely no intention of breaking anything anytime soon. Especially not in a cave."

* * *

 **Author's Note:** And that's it, end of the first proper story I've written in years. Thank you for reading! I'd be delighted to hear what you thought about it. :)

And for the record, the caves that featured in this story were both completely imaginary, although bits of them were based on real places that I've visited myself.


End file.
